Under a cap, the balding Woody wore a wig so he resembled a long-haired biker.
Wenner was fond of Woody, whom he perceived as “slightly vulnerable … Like he was searching for who he was,” he later observed. Initially thinking of him as kind of a milquetoast figure, Wenner changed his mind after they stopped at a health club in Nevada to work out and he watched in awe as the Band-Aid heir did dozens of chin-ups, and discovered that Woody was “a real ironman type underneath.”
Woody’s emphasis on keeping his body fit had all to do with his overweight, hard-drinking father’s death from cancer at the age of fifty. “He was so afraid he was going to get cancer and die at a young age, so he ate responsibly, worked out constantly, and stopped drinking,” says his ex-wife, Sale. “He’s in better shape than anyone I know, including professional athletes.”
Healthwise, he was more like his weight-conscious grandfather, the General, who so despised the corpulent that he even left his first wife when she grew fat for a thinner model. Among those in Woody’s close circle were also men of weight, both power and heft, among them New Jersey governor Chris Christie and the Jets’ head coach Rex Ryan, who once topped three hundred pounds. Woody helped Ryan lose more than one hundred pounds through lap-band surgery, and he advised the tough-talking Christie, a big supporter with Woody of the 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, to get a trainer.
So it was no surprise that Wenner was impressed when he saw Woody work out during their motorcycle jaunt across America.
Eric Ryan, a biker himself back in the day, got a kick out of Woody’s cross-country adventure, because, he says, they weren’t really slumming. While he remembered Woody owning a powerful Norton at the University of Arizona, he didn’t view Woody and his rich gang in leathers as Hell’s Angels types when they roared to California. “They had a truck follow them around with their luggage and spare bikes—and mechanics,” he says. “They had an infrastructure. This was not Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda reliving Easy Rider. This was Black American Express card motorcycle touring.”
While Woody was cruising on his Harley, Sale was usually riding and showing her champion Arabian horses, one of whom she named “The General,” after Woody’s grandfather, Robert Wood Johnson Jr. It won a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics.
Horses had virtually become her life. She had riders and trainers and trailers, and state-of-the-art stables with stainless steel water stalls. She was said to have had about three dozen horses, each worth an estimated five hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars, and she lovingly treated them like humans.
At one point, she was running an international breeding operation with two Olympic stallions, selling their sperm to other breeders, which was an opportunity to recoup some of her investment.
She also bred dogs when the opportunity arose, and it was during one of the births of twelve golden retrievers at the Johnsons’ New Jersey farm that Sale, a staunch Republican like Woody, disappointed the first family at the time, the liberal Democratic Clintons.
Bill and Hillary had been hunting for a dog for daughter Chelsea after losing a bid for a golden during a benefit auction at the first daughter’s school in Washington. They bid thirty-five hundred dollars and lost it by three hundred dollars. Through the wife of Vernon Jordan, chairman of Clinton’s transition group, the Clintons heard that Sale Johnson had just the kind of well-bred golden puppy they wanted.
But Sale wasn’t about to give the commander in chief of the free world any VIP treatment. “I said, ‘Great, but they will have to leave it up to me whether they get a male or female, because other people are ahead of them on the list,” she told The Times at the time.
When Sale heard that the Clintons wanted a dog held for them because Chelsea was suffering from allergies, she gave a resounding no. The last two Johnson puppies in the litter went to a couple of other GOP billionaires—the philanthropist and venture capitalist Laurance Rockefeller, and the five-times-married business magnate Ronald O. Perelman, whose pup “left by helicopter, of course,” Sale later boasted.
Woody’s decision to acquire the Jets and divest himself of Sale were two of his more popular decisions among a number of members of the Johnson dynasty who never could stomach her aggressive manner.
“Everything one needs to know about Sale Johnson, I can relate in one anecdote,” Eric Ryan maintains, calling her “a piece of work. She and Woody stopped by my mom [Mary Lea Johnson Ryan D’Arc Richards] and Marty’s [Richards] house on Gin Lane in Southampton one holiday season and they brought two one-kilo cans of Beluga caviar, and they all gorged on champagne and caviar. When the time came for Sale and Woody to leave, she popped by the kitchen and picked up the remaining can and took it with her. That’s Sale.”
* * *
When it came to arriving at a financial settlement with Woody, Sale claims that she just wanted enough money to live comfortably. But the billionaire Jets owner battled to hold on to as much money as he could.
In 2012, Sale says, “I only wanted to just be comfortable.”
She says she wasn’t aware of any battle over the financial settlement—but only because she never attended any of the negotiations. Instead, she sat outside the talks in another room. “I didn’t want anything to ruin my feelings towards Woody in case there was anything negative going on in there,” she contends.
At the time the settlement was being hammered out, Woody was still living at home, but he soon moved out and began his newfound bachelorhood in a plush Manhattan apartment at his friend Donald Trump’s International Hotel & Tower, where Woody’s sister, Libet, had thousands of square feet of luxe accommadations.
The prenuptial agreement that Sale had signed before they got married was worthless by the time of the divorce talks “and wouldn’t even hold up in court,” Sale maintains.
In one of her more extraordinary assertions, Sale—long considered Woody’s PalmPilot—claims that in all the years she was married to the Johnson & Johnson heir she never knew how wealthy he really was, and it came as a shock to her.
“Woody is very private about anything to do with money, including with me—that’s why I never knew how much money he had,” Sale insists. “I never asked and I never really cared because that’s not why I married him. We were together for over thirty years, and I wasn’t involved in any of the financial end of anything. We were divorced before I realized the extent of what Woody had, of all of his money. I knew we lived the kind of life where I could buy whatever I wanted, but I was a conservative buyer. I still had my St. Louis mentality. When we got divorced I realized, wow, people [like Woody] actually had a billion dollars besides someone like Adnan Khashoggi [the Saudi Arabian reputed arms dealer].”
When the Johnson divorce was finalized in November 2001, Sale did not get the family’s palatial apartment at 834 Fifth Avenue, but she was permitted by Woody to reside there for a year while house-hunting. Woody kept 834 to hold social events.
For ten million dollars in 2002, Sale bought a 5,500-square-foot triplex maisonette with five guest bedrooms and five and a half bathrooms at 817 Fifth Avenue—with a private entrance on Fifth Avenue—just a block south of the family home. Her neighbors included the Las Vegas hotel and casino owner Steve Wynn. Richard Gere also lived there for a time. (In late 2010, while residing mostly in Florida, she listed the apartment during the Great Recession for $21 million, more than twice what she had paid.)
Sale also did not get their spectacular farm property in Bedminster, New Jersey. However, Woody permitted her to use the stables and some of the land, mainly because of their daughter Daisy’s equestrian activities.
“The farm was where Daisy’s horses were kept and where Daisy would ride,” says Eric Ryan. “After the divorce, Sale was allowed to stay on and have access to some of the property and, I guess, have use of the guesthouse to accommodate Daisy’s needs.”
Woody’s land, along with surrounding privately owned property, was often used by a Gladstone, New Jersey, orga
nization called the Essex Fox Hounds, founded in 1912, for elegant foxhunts.
“But post-divorce, Sale shut that down,” claims Ryan, a lawyer. “She wouldn’t give the foxhunt access there anymore. She didn’t have the legal standing to do that because she just had tenancy on the guest property, but nobody wanted to deal with her, and they said, okay, what the fuck, we’ll stay off the land. Sale’s not a pleasant person.”
Sale was later “forbidden” by Woody to use the property, and Daisy moved her horses to the WGHR Farm, also in Bedminister. Moreover, Ed Saltzman understood that the Johnson dynasty essentially “disowned Sale completely” after the divorce, and that “they don’t even know she’s alive.”
But Sale disputes any such estrangement and boasts that more than a decade after the divorce, she has remained especially close to her ex-mother-in-law, Betty Johnson, whom she calls “Granny Princess,” a nickname bestowed upon the matriarch by her granddaughter Casey. “Betty and I got along great, and we still get along,” maintains Sale. “She hangs up the phone and she goes, ‘I love you.’ At one point she sent me a letter thanking me for being married to her son and taking such good care of him and her grandkids.”
When Sale’s financial settlement with Woody was finally worked out, she received a whopping $100 million, or at least that’s what her father joyfully boasted to several confidants.
Sale says that figure is “wrong,” but refuses to elaborate.
“In hindsight,” she declares, “I should have gotten way more money than I got.”
51
Casey Johnson’s childhood diabetes, diagnosed when she was eight and a half years old, was revealed by her parents in their 1990s self-help book. But what they weren’t aware of at the time was that her increasingly turbulent behavior was attributable to a form of mental illness. She was subsequently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), her mother reveals for the first time in 2012, two years after her daughter’s death.
As defined by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), BPD is “a serious mental illness marked by unstable moods, behavior, and relationships,” the symptoms that Casey always possessed and that grew increasingly severe in the last years of her life. BPD was first listed as a diagnosable illness in 1980 when Casey was one year old, but little was known about it then. But some reported studies have suggested that early symptoms may occur during childhood. In Casey’s case, the studies were accurate, based on her erratic behavior, which also was initially linked to her negative physical, emotional, and social reaction to being diabetic.
“Borderline personality disorder ruled Casey’s life,” declares her mother. “It stole her teenage years and her young adulthood life away from her. It’s a mental health disease that confounds, scares, hurts the victim, her family, her friends, and her doctors. They don’t want to treat it because it has the highest suicide rate, and no cure, and [someone like Casey] is a twenty-four/seven patient.”
In January 2009, Time, in a story headlined “The Mystery of Borderline Personality Disorder,” quoted noted BPD expert Marsha Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington, as stating: “Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients. They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering.”
Beginning when Casey was about nine years old, her mother began taking her to see the first of a number of psychiatrists to try to get her life in order.
Sale, too, went into therapy to help her deal with Casey. But, she claims, the psychiatrist was more interested in what was happening in her active life as a New York socialite, “not in solving any of my issues. After two years of going to him for, like, twice a week, I realized he wasn’t helping me.”
Plus, she says, her psychiatrist “wanted to charge me for some revisits when I wasn’t there,” which the wealthy Johnson dynasty wife, who kept a close watch on whether people were trying to cheat the family, couldn’t abide.
In any case, it was that doctor who recommended the first psychiatrist that Casey saw.
She was board certified in pediatric and adolescent psychiatry, and had a practice on the Upper East Side, not far from the Johnsons’ Fifth Avenue mansion in the sky.
“I would take Casey there every week,” relates Sale, “and Casey didn’t really want to go because the psychiatrist had not a sense of humor anywhere in her body, and so everything was very serious, and so Casey didn’t want to talk to her.”
Sale would sit in the waiting room during Casey’s sessions, but when the child came out she refused to talk to her mother about what had been discussed. “I would say to her, ‘Was everything okay? Did you talk to her? Was she able to help?’ You know, talking to a nine-year-old, and Casey would say, ‘I didn’t talk to her. I don’t like her.’”
After a number of sessions, the psychiatrist suggested that Sale go for coffee and return when Casey’s session was finished. “It turned out that Casey would wait for ten minutes until after I left and then she’d say she had to go to the bathroom, and she’d lock herself in and wouldn’t come out until I came back to pick her up. The psychiatrist never told me that—she just kept taking the money.”
The next to see Casey was another esteemed New York City child psychiatrist who would remain involved with her case for the rest of her life.
“His initial diagnosis was just that she had some depressive issues somewhat related to her diabetes, but then he realized that it was more than that,” says Sale, looking back. “Even though Casey was a minor, she told him she didn’t want him to talk to her family, and so as a result he didn’t include us like he should have.” She adds, “He was aware of more intense problems than he told us.”
From the beginning of treatment, Sale claims, the psychiatrist began playing the role of “father figure” to Casey “because Woody was not a warm, cuddly kind of person. With Casey, Woody was so uncomfortable because he didn’t know what to do with her, or how to react to her situation because she was not easy to deal with. She was very complicated, and it was overwhelming in a large part for Woody despite his best efforts.”
Casey’s behavior was consistent with BPD, agrees a relative who was aware of the psychiatric efforts to treat her.
“She really reserved the worst of her personality behavior towards people who were closest to her,” states this person. “She was the meanest to those who loved her the most, and it was something she had no control over.”
It wasn’t until 2008 that Sale Johnson says she first confronted the psychiatrist about his treatment and initial diagnosis. It happened on the day Casey was being hospitalized for the fourth time for the same reason: to detoxify her body of the “cocktail of drugs” she had been prescribed to help with her moods and behavior.
“[He] diagnosed Casey as bipolar, but he didn’t discuss any of that with us,” claims Sale. “I said to him, ‘You’ve never treated Casey as if she had borderline personality disorder, but you do know that that’s what she has, don’t you?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I do.’ He admitted it.”
She also claims he had “a relationship with Casey that was beyond professional” because he sometimes met with her at his apartment if it was at night and his office was closed and she needed to talk. “I don’t think that was professional, but Casey worshiped him because he was there for her at her most serious moments. He was her father figure in many ways, and all Casey wanted was her father’s approval. She lived for that, and she was broken down because she didn’t get it.”
In the last couple of years of her life, “Casey sent love letters to her father. She FedExed love letters. She called and left voice mails, and Woody chose not to respond,” her mother adds.
* * *
After Casey Johnson finally got her high school diploma with much effort, and following her very brief matriculation at Brown, and after her debutante ball in 1998 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, she took a couple of glamorous jobs in New York to keep her
self occupied.
None of them lasted for very long.
One of the disturbed Johnson heiress’s jobs, the kind that had required the Johnson dynasty name and influence to acquire, was at a slick lifestyle magazine called Manhattan File that covered the upscale and hip. Its founder, editor in chief, and publisher was a young, attractive Cornell University alumnus by the name of Cristina Greeven, who had married former New York governor Mario Cuomo’s son, the ABC news personality Christopher “Chris” Cuomo. His brother, Andrew Cuomo, also was elected governor of the Empire State, and had been married to a Kennedy.
In short, Casey’s workplace was full of high-powered connections, a veritable cornucopia of iconic dynasties. The Johnson name added even more pizzazz and influence.
Like Casey, Greeven herself was a socialite from a venerable family; her great-grandfather had once served as the German Minister of State, and was renowned for reportedly founding the legendary Orient Express rail line in the early twentieth century. Greeven, who had a home in tony Southampton near the Johnsons, adored Casey. Because the two had something in common—a girly love of anything involving beauty care—she appointed her as the magazine’s beauty editor, Casey’s lack of any journalistic training notwithstanding.
“She’s definitely way ahead of her time. She’s not limited by having grown up in the Johnson and Johnson family, in a sheltered environment. She acts as a bridge between everybody,” Greeven was quoted as saying in one of the first articles about Casey Johnson in an October 2000 issue of the weekly New York Observer newspaper that was headlined, “How to Be the ‘It’ Girl.”
“Cristina really liked Casey and really was a mentor and an older sister figure to Casey,” says Casey’s friend the trendy journalist Peter Davis, who was the style editor at Manhattan File. “Cristina met Casey and saw potential, and realized this was someone from her world and gave her a shot.”
Davis, from a wealthy family himself, had first gotten to know Casey, five years his junior, as a fellow member of the upscale Manhattan young social scene—a world that was right out of the TV soap opera Gossip Girl.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 37