At Manhattan File, with the Johnson name, Casey easily had entre to the beauty products world, so with that imprimatur she was an asset to the magazine. The job was well suited to her. “She was definitely a beauty products junkie,” observes Davis. “She told me she wanted to start her own beauty line, an upscale line of products.”
While many of the young people in Casey’s circle were still living in their parents’ Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue homes—like the Hilton sisters—or were in college and finishing schools, Casey had gotten her own duplex, one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. It was starkly contemporary, painted all white, and filled with photos of her idols, Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. One picture, a semi-pornographic shot, was of the almost nude “Material Girl,” practically making love to a bottle of Evian water. It was hung in a prominent position over the baby oil heiress’s sofa.
“Her apartment was very girly,” says Davis. “There was lots of expensive jewelry, and she played Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ over and over and over.”
The first time he was at Casey’s was with a mutual friend, Juliet Hartford, the daughter from a third marriage of A&P supermarket heir Huntington Hartford II. Casey and Juliet had become bosom buddies and had similar personalities. As Davis puts it, “Both were shy, but always wanted the spotlight, and craved publicity at any costs. I went over there and they were getting ready to go out and gobbing on tons of really thick makeup.”
Casey’s bathroom was a sight to behold, recalls Davis.
“It had those mirrors with bright bulbs over them, and it looked like a dressing room for a Broadway actress,” says Davis, who has never forgotten it. “There were cartons and cartons of makeup and creams. Girls love to collect makeup and beauty products, but this was overload.”
If Casey emulated and resembled anyone, it was not her mother, or any other female member of the Johnson dynasty. It was her maternal grandmother, the blond and beautiful Mary Melisse Frey, who, in her early twenties, had lived in New York as a cosmetologist. Like her future granddaughter, she had been preoccupied with beauty products. “Casey was the spitting image of my mother,” boasts Sale Johnson Rashad. “There are pictures of Casey at ten and my mother at ten and they looked like the same person. They had a great bond. When my mother visited, Casey would dress her up and put makeup on her, and my mom would let Casey dye her hair. They’d go to the drugstore to shop for cosmetics.”
Peers thought of Casey as “fun and spunky,” “social and precocious,” “like a little butterfly, there’s a light inside of her,” “she has that old guard charm.” But few if any knew about the demons that possessed her. Sometimes Casey herself seemed unaware of them.
Peter Davis, who felt he knew her well, considered her “socially withdrawn. She tagged along with girls that were a lot more aggressive and wild and more motivated to get some spotlight. Casey wasn’t someone who went to the front of the line and said, ‘I’m Casey Johnson. Let me in.’ We went to a party and there were these photographers taking pictures and she almost seemed shocked at that point, shocked that people were taking her picture,” continues Davis. “She didn’t really know how to handle it. She said to me, ‘They think I’m a bitch because I don’t smile, but I really don’t know how to deal with this.’ At the same time she craved it, so it was a double-edged sword.”
Casey worked at Manhattan File no more than eighteen months, but while she was there she took her job seriously. People considered her mature for her age, and she felt she was, too. “When you’re diagnosed with a disease at an early age, you’re forced to grow up,” she once said.
Her New York nights were spent partying. The hot club of the moment at the time was called Moomba, where Leonardo DiCaprio was a regular, and where Casey Johnson grabbed the microphone to mouth Madonna’s lyrics on karaoke night. Or, on a weekend, she’d be at the Conscience Point Inn, the “In” nightspot in the trendy Hamptons, dancing with her so-called “celebutante” pals, Paris and Nicky Hilton, and where another flashy and wealthy acquaintance, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Grubman, the daughter of a powerful entertainment lawyer, hung out.
After Casey decided to leave her job at Manhattan File, she went to work for Grubman’s New York public relations firm, which handled such clients as Britney Spears. “She made an appointment for an interview,” Grubman, eight years Casey’s senior, later claimed, as if Casey was like any other job applicant. She described her work as “phenomenal.” Peter Davis, who also knew Grubman, asserts that Casey and Grubman “knew each other socially. They hire the people they know.”
Wild like Casey, the blond, fit, and always tanned Grubman became a tabloid sensation herself when she was arrested at the Conscience Point in Southampton on charges she ran down a crowd of people in her father’s black Mercedes SUV, driving in reverse, and injuring at least sixteen. When a security guard asked her to move her vehicle, he claimed she yelled at him, “Fuck you, white trash.” She was sentenced to at least sixty days, and it became known in the tabloids as the “Lizzie Grubman Affair.”
Casey worked at Grubman’s firm several days a week, and was expected to use her Johnson name, influence, and sources in her jam-packed Louis Vuitton Filofax to get the right kind of people to attend parties and events being promoted by the firm. “If it’s for Puff Daddy,” she once told a reporter, “I’m not going to call my grandmother and say, ‘Hey, granny, come to Puffy.’ If it’s appropriate, I’ll call my mother.”
Casey celebrated her twenty-first birthday around the time her father was buying the Jets and her parents were negotiating their divorce settlement. The party was thrown at the famed Manhattan nightclub “21.” About two dozen people had shown up to watch the heiress blow out the candles, among them Nicky Hilton, Marty Richards, and Casey’s godmother, Diandra Douglas, who considered Casey the daughter she never had, and who would continue to play a key role in Casey’s life.
* * *
Around 2001, Casey Johnson fled New York for Los Angeles—La-La Land.
Initially, she had a fantasy that she might become an actress or a singer (she’d taken singing lessons since she was twelve), but mainly she just wanted to get away from her family. That was underscored by a story she once told about attending a Hollywood party where she overheard one girl telling another, “‘Oh, that’s the Johnson and Johnson girl,’ and my heart just sank because I don’t want to be identified like that. I’m Casey Johnson. I’m not the Johnson and Johnson girl. It really hurt.”
In Hollywood, her life would become a nightmare, her already distant relationship with her father and mother would be damaged, and it would all end horrifically.
But, in the beginning, the Baby Powder heiress with the baby face had high hopes, even though she initially knew no one in the City of Angels. It took her almost four years to get adjusted to the L.A. scene.
Like so many members of the Johnson dynasty before her, she was wary of people, and felt some took advantage of her because she was a Johnson. “You really have to get to know why someone wants to be your friend,” she firmly believed, “and I’ve learned that the hard way. I’ve found a lot of people use me … I just let things happen, and then I find out, ‘Oh, my God, they’re totally taking advantage of me.”
That’s what she would claim to friends after the Vanity Fair imbroglio in 2006.
It had all started when Richard Johnson (no relation), then the editor of the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column, telephoned Casey, and read to her an exchange of leaked e-mails between a man who had been her boyfriend, John Dee, and her aunt, Casey’s father’s sister, Elizabeth Ross “Libet” Johnson, strongly suggesting a romance had occurred between the two behind Casey’s back.
Rather than offering a “no comment” and hanging up, Casey went ballistic. She blasted Libet in a column that appeared in the Post on March 29, 2006, charging that her eccentric, five-times-married, fifty-six-year-old socialite cougar aunt had seduced and stolen her thirty-eight-year-old boyfriend. Casey was quoted as saying Libet “need
s help … I feel sorry for her. She’s single. She’s been divorced umpteen times. She’s afraid to go out in public … She was sleeping with my boyfriend who I was in love with. An old woman with a lot of money is a very powerful aphrodisiac.”
It was such a blockbuster of a story, where all the principals were named and/or quoted, that the Rupert Murdoch–owned Post, which thrives on scandal, prominently featured the story, as if World War III had been declared.
To the ultra-secret and private Woody Johnson and the Johnson dynasty as a whole, Casey was now considered a tabloid terrorist, and her act of vengeance their own personal 9/11.
Woody, who had mostly washed his hands of Casey because of how troublesome she was, cut off all ties with his daughter. He tied up her trust fund millions, including the interest, which had financed Casey’s high-style life in New York and then in Los Angeles ever since she had received her first big check at twenty-one.
Having seen the damage her words had caused within the family, one would have thought she’d go underground and keep her plump, injected lips zipped.
But Casey didn’t stop with the Post.
When Vanity Fair contacted her and said they wanted to write a profile, Casey was in heaven.
Her mother wasn’t.
“She talked to me about it and I said, ‘Casey, you absolutely should not do this. They don’t write nice articles. They write articles that sell magazines,’” recalls Sale, who didn’t like or trust journalists. “I told her, ‘They are not filled with real facts that make you look good, and you’re not going to look good.’ She said, ‘No, Mom, it’s a puff piece. They said they are going to say really nice things and they are going to show beautiful pictures.’”
As usual, Casey didn’t take her mother’s advice.
She dolled herself up, draped herself in diamonds, and cooperated, meeting with a female writer in a New York restaurant, and then inviting her for more interviewing at her Spanish-style mansion in Bel Air, shoveling more dirt about her aunt in what became a lengthy cover story aptly titled “Heiress vs. Heiress,” which ran in September 2006.
When it hit the stands, any hope for a rapprochement with her father, aunt, and paternal grandmother was buried for good.
Beyond Casey’s destructive quotes was the shocking photograph for which she agreed to pose: appearing baby-fat chunky at five-foot-two, arrogantly exhaling a haze of cigarette smoke through bloated lips, her blond hair done up like Monroe, she was practically nude, except for a towel covering her surgically enhanced breasts, and her private parts.
“Casey wanted attention, and this was her first big stab at getting it,” observes Peter Davis. “And I think what she did with the Post and the magazine was kind of a public cry for help. A lot of her behavior was rebellion to piss off her parents.”
Casey had certainly succeeded.
“She was not very savvy in the ways of the press,” says a Casey confidant in Los Angeles. “Casey told me Vanity Fair told her that they were going to write the story anyway without her, and Casey thought if she cooperated the story would be less brutal on her than if she didn’t cooperate. She told me, ‘If I cooperate with them, they’ll write a nice fluff piece. If I don’t cooperate with them and they do it without me, God knows what they’ll write.’ They threw her under the bus, and over the coals. Her reaction to the story was immediate horror,” he says. “But she still didn’t realize how far-reaching the damage was until it caused her whole family to unravel.”
Poor little rich girl Casey, as it turned out, had become the most recent in a series of Johnson dynasty heirs and heiresses who had heaped embarrassment and shame on the family.
“There’s been lots of things going on in the Johnson family that have been embarrassing,” declares Sale Johnson. “It’s not like they were not used to that. I mean, Woody’s sister has been divorced five times. Between that and his brothers’ deaths, and his father and his grandfather [the General], it’s been a complicated family. But Vanity Fair took complete advantage of Casey. They twisted everything she said, and they said things that weren’t true. They inflamed the [family] situation that was only mild and that now became scathing.”
Beyond that she asserts that because of Casey’s borderline personality disorder she wasn’t thinking straight agreeing to cooperate with the magazine because “BPD controlled every aspect of her life. She was unstable.”
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Whatever Casey Johnson’s emotional and physical state, her very public and harmful tell-all about her aunt, Libet Johnson, had the instant effect of alienating virtually everyone—on both sides. The Johnson dynasty disowned her, and Libet’s own circle was mortified.
Without having any say in the matter, the very private, much older Johnson heiress who had lived with her hundreds of millions of trust fund dollars under the radar for most of her life was suddenly, embarrassingly, caught in the tabloid spotlight.
Still, little was publicly known about Bobby and Betty Johnson’s third child, who was born in 1950—the middle child and only girl of a rambunctious brood of boys—after Woody and Keith, and before Billy and Christopher.
Libet’s best friend growing up on Edgerstoune Road in Princeton, who remained her lifelong confidante and defender, was pretty, bright Lucinda Ziesing, whose mother, Faith Whitney Ziesing, had served as the president of the New York Junior League and was a founder of the Women’s National Republican Club. Her father, Faith’s second husband, was Hibben Ziesing, a chemical consultant.
The Ziesings were the Johnsons’ next-door neighbors, and because Lucinda’s two sisters were a decade older, she immediately bonded with Libet, who back then was skinny, shy, and, like her brothers, had fair skin and was blond like their mother.
“Libet was my gang,” says Ziesing many years later. “I would run over there for fun. Libet and I have been friends forever.”
Ziesing also adored Libet’s mom.
“Very rarely,” she says, “do you get a woman who hasn’t come from money to be trained to know what to do and how to behave. But Betty stepped into the role after Bob died.”
The two bosom buddies, Libet and Lucinda, went to the exclusive Miss Fine’s School, founded in the late nineteenth century by May Margaret Fine, offering college preparation classes long before many young women considered going to college.
By the time Libet was matriculating there, however, Miss Fine’s had become part of the then all-boys Princeton Country Day, where her brothers Woody and Keith attended. Ziesing would date Jeff Delano, Keith’s friend at PCD who was part of the group with Keith that went on to Millbrook School and had to repeat ninth grade. And when Woody broke his back, Ziesing, who was living on an Indian reservation out west during her hippie period, went to visit him in Arizona to cheer him up. (She later made millions as one of the founders of the Celestial Seasonings tea company.)
Ziesing was a class ahead of Libet at Miss Fine’s when Betty Johnson transferred her thirteen-year-old daughter, who had become a bit of a wild child like her brothers, to the stricter, Catholic all-girls Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart, in Princeton, when it first opened in 1963, according to Ziesing. The school had been named for Mother Janet Erskine Stuart, a Roman Catholic nun and educator from Britain. One of her books was The Education of Catholic Girls, another Highways and Byways in the Spiritual Life.
It didn’t appear, though, that any of Mother Janet Stuart’s stern Catholic teachings had any impact on the wealthy Johnson heiress, who would be married and divorced five times, and have a slew of boyfriends over the years, even including one stolen from her niece, if the published stories were to be believed.
One of the first very young men in Libet’s romantic life was the teenager Neil Vicino, her brother Keith’s best friend, who wasn’t completely swept away by her. Looking back many years later after his own marriage and divorce, he recalls, “Libet was quite quiet and demure and almost introverted, and she certainly didn’t seem to have that party thing going on that Woody had. The
re were times when we would go into Bob and Betty’s bedroom and watch TV,” he continues, “and when I had a school dance, I invited Libet, and there were a couple of other dates along the way.”
After Stuart, Libet was able to get into Sarah Lawrence College with the possible assistance of Lucinda Ziesing’s mother, who had been a trustee at the college and was one of the first Sarah Lawrence alumna appointed to the college faculty. Libet spent a year there, says Lucinda.
Like her troubled niece Casey, Libet Johnson apparently wasn’t much interested in academia.
Libet did her generations’s sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll thing, too, for a while, to the chagrin of her very conservative mother, Betty, around the time her father, Bobby Johnson, died in 1970.
“She bought a Ford Econoline van and had a carpenter outfit the interior like a camper and spent a summer traveling around to music festivals with another girlfriend,” recalls her cousin Eric Ryan. “Her family was totally horrified that Libet had developed this burning-incense-and-writing-poetry-by-candlelight kind of persona for a brief period, and maybe even walked around without a brassiere on.”
Her first husband was an executive at Columbia Records in New York, by the name of Christopher Wright. Considered “the straightest guy in the world” by the likes of Eric Ryan, Wright also was a talented landscape painter who worked in the style of Andrew Wyeth. When Libet and Chris were dating they had spent a romantic weekend in the town of Blue Hill, in Maine, and had stayed at the Blue Hill Inn, an intimate bed-and-breakfast built in 1835 and near the headwaters of Blue Hill Bay.
They had a big, albeit private, wedding and reception at the Johnson home in Princeton, and had planned to have their honeymoon at the Blue Hill. But Libet’s groom was stuck at the record company because of a financial scandal there, and he felt a responsibility to his employer to do damage control, according to Ryan.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 38