Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  “As a result,” he says, “Libet was left waiting up in Maine, like, ‘Well, where’s my new husband? This is no fun.’”

  After they got married, they were so entranced with the Blue Hill, they actually bought the inn, “thinking they could live a simple life where she would be the innkeeper, and he could use the empty rooms in the inn to paint because the place only did business in the summer,” says Ryan.

  That first summer, circa 1977, Libet hired Ryan to help run the place at a time when his troubled mother, Mary Lea Johnson, was then in the daily tabloid headlines because of the hit man and kinky sex scandal involving her then husband, Vincent D’Arc. Ryan also brought along his girlfriend of the moment, Rebecca, as his assistant chief cook and bottle washer.

  “The inn was doing okay business-wise, and Libet’s accountants had told her to run the place as if it was a real business. As a result of that admonition, she paid Rebecca and myself the princely sum of $62.50 a week to work like what turned out to be fourteen hours a day, and Rebecca and I shared a little room in the attic that I actually built in the attic with plywood because, again, Libet’s accountants wanted all the real rooms in the inn to generate revenue. Meanwhile, Libet would spend all of her time shopping for antiques.”

  Libet’s first celebrity guest, and possibly her last, was a bodybuilder from Austria by the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who at the time had just become known as the star of a documentary called Pumping Iron. Libet and Chris happened to be friends with George Butler, the film’s director, and invited him and his muscle-bound main attraction to visit the Blue Hill.

  “Butler introduced Arnold to Libet and she took a big shine to him,” observes Ryan, who broke bread at dinner with them, and saw the sparks fly.

  Ryan doesn’t know for certain whether anything of a romantic nature happened between his cousin Libet and the future Terminator star and governor of California. But Schwarzenegger certainly had a reputation as a womanizer, and later in life fathered a love child with a household staffer during his marriage to the Kennedy clan’s Maria Shriver.

  “It’s hard to say if anything happened between Libet and Arnold, but there was certainly a flirtation between them,” notes Ryan. “Chris and Libet ended up getting divorced shortly thereafter. She got bored with the inn, sold it, and they moved to Concord, Massachusetts. Their marriage only lasted about fourteen months, from inception to end.”

  * * *

  As with the bed-and-breakfast, Libet also would eventually become bored with another business enterprise that she had jumped headfirst into in the late seventies—an art gallery in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo district, inspired by her intense and growing interest in esoteric folk art, which the heiress was collecting in huge and costly quantities.

  Some say she was following in the footsteps of Seward Johnson Jr.’s ex-wife, Barbara, who was running the troubled Folk Art Museum in New York, and who herself had built a world-class folk art and whaling collection. Another dynasty member considered an inspiration for Libet’s interest was Mary Lea Johnson, who had had an art gallery in Manhattan.

  In 1979, a Madison Avenue folk art dealer by the name of Jimmy Cronin, whose best customer was Libet Johnson, introduced her to a new dealer in the business, Roger Ricco. At the time, Ricco and his wife were living in a Chelsea loft that was about to go co-op and he had just three days to come up with the forty-thousand-dollar deposit, which he didn’t have. Enter Libet Johnson. She came in to his pop-up gallery on a Wednesday, the first day of Ricco’s three-day deadline, and immediately purchased eighty thousand dollars’ worth of collectible folk art, the biggest piece costing about ten thousand dollars. Ricco had to split the sale with his business partner, but he now magically had the forty thousand dollars in hand to buy the loft.

  “It’s this mystical destiny stuff in which I live my life,” says Ricco decades later of Libet’s appearance and purchase.

  A few days later he rode up the service elevator to Libet’s penthouse to deliver her latest acquisitions, which he remembers as a “jaw-dropping” moment. “I’ve met a lot of wealthy people, but this was really up there even at that time. I was let in by one of her help, and her apartment was huge, and I was standing in the grand living room that was about forty or fifty feet across, and was just amazed at it all.”

  Two other things amazed him about that second encounter with the Band-Aid millionaires. “She had a problem with alcohol, and even on that first visit to her apartment I realized that she was kind of loose, let’s say,” recalls Ricco. “I could see that. It doesn’t take much to pick it up. What also struck me during that first encounter was that she was extraordinarily lonely. Here was a young woman with unlimited wealth, able to do anything she wanted. But the salient word that just hangs with me is a sense of loneliness. I saw it that day I walked into her apartment and I saw this huge place with this young, beautiful woman wandering on the polished floors. It was in the middle of a sunny New York day and I could tell that she had been drinking, so that made me feel sad.”

  The other thing that amazed him—and relieved him in that moment of sadness—was that Libet out of the blue asked him if he wanted to go into business with her in a gallery specializing in folk art, and he immediately, joyfully said yes to his wealthy new client and partner, and they shook on it. At the time he had an art restoration business, Whole Art. But with Libet’s offer, he immediately sold it to his help for one dollar.

  Libet had turned his life upside down and opened up a fantasy-like new world. “I come from the Midwest, from a blue-collar family, and I was thrown into a world in which what she might spend in a day on throw rugs for the bathroom would be close to my yearly salary at that time.”

  Despite Libet’s loneliness and whatever other problem Ricco perceived his new partner had, he says that early on in their relationship, “I just loved her, thought she was terrific, adventurous, had absolute enthusiasm, and everything else.”

  She put up about three hundred thousand dollars, and the partners immediately began looking for a space in SoHo and found it on Broome Street, and Libet retained an architect to design the place.

  “We were buying a lot of inventory—objects that people were selling. But her warning words to me were, ‘I’m not going to be a shopkeeper!’ But I didn’t expect her to be because she was Libet Johnson, a society lady.”

  With the business running, the two socialized. Along the way, he met her brother Woody a couple of times, and their mother, Betty, who “was kind of proud that Libet had started a gallery.”

  On one incredible occasion Libet invited Ricco and his wife on a cruise through the Adriatic aboard the Sea Prince, the spectacular yacht that had been owned by her late brother, Keith, who had died of a cocaine overdose, and about whom she never spoke. He remembers being aboard the boat with so much beauty and the sea around them, but everyone else aboard seemed “blasé,” including a woman guest who spent all of her time knitting, instead of enjoying the setting.

  Libet invited him to her estate in Millbrook, where she wanted him to participate in a foxhunt with her and her rich friends and their hounds. “I was very much involved in Buddhism and not in killing anything, and the fun of that day was to do a hounds after the foxes. I didn’t lecture her, but I said, ‘Can you imagine watching this hunt from a glider and here you all are chasing this little fox for fun. It looks absurd to me.’ I wasn’t being judgmental, but I realized I couldn’t live that life.”

  One evening in September 1982, he accompanied her to the opera, but Libet was in a state of devastation. She had just heard that a woman she idolized from afar, the actress and Princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly, had been killed in an automobile accident after suffering a stroke at the wheel. “Libet was so upset about the loss of Grace because she admired her so much.”

  By the third year of their business partnership, Ricco began to feel a chill from Libet, who was less involved and interested in their gallery. “I would attribute it to a certain amount of fickleness on her
part, meaning she’d get really interested in something, and then have to move on.”

  Like her brother Woody’s first business partner who got axed, Ricco’s days as Libet’s associate were numbered.

  Finally, around 1983–1984, “Her financial people called me up and asked me to come up to her apartment, and I kind of expected it. She had become less of a participant.” At the same time, Ricco says, a new form of folk art made by unknowns was coming into vogue—many of the artists were poor blacks from the South, some others were mental patients. “But Libet didn’t get on board with the new stuff. She didn’t have or gain quick enough interest. She didn’t get the future and she called her people at that point and probably said, What is this guy doing? Fortunately, they got rid of me.”

  He says he never heard from her again.

  “She had supported me out of nowhere, and I felt I had gotten something good out of the situation. I’d later hear things about her, that she was marrying this guy, or that guy. I came to think anything’s possible—particularly in that family.”

  Looking back years later, he says it was sad that they hadn’t stayed in touch “because I had a lot to offer her as a friend, not as a commodity.”

  * * *

  After her first divorce, Libet had a couple of boyfriends “including country western singers with outlaw reputations,” according to Eric Ryan, before she married husband number two, another in the record industry, Arma Andon.

  “It was a pretty wild ride,” recalls Andon of their relationship. “It was exciting.”

  It also was tragic and turbulent.

  The half-Armenian Andon, a charming and outgoing Fordham University graduate, had first gotten to know Libet when she was married to Chris Wright, who was a colleague of Andon’s at Columbia Records, where Andon was then “a young marketing guy” in his midtwenties.

  After the Libet-Wright divorce, “Somehow Libet and I just bumped into each other somewhere,” he says years later. The two began dating and “eventually moved in with each other.” At the time, Libet was living in a sumptuous ground-floor apartment in an Upper East Side brownstone.

  “She was the love of my life,” notes Andon. “Libet can have a big impact on you. She was also beautiful on top of everything.”

  Not long after they began cohabitating, they were married in a civil ceremony by a New York City judge. “It was just us, Woody, and the judge—and Woody gave her away,” he says. Another who Andon recalls might have been in attendance for the simple nuptials was the couple’s pal Jimmy Pullis, who owned JP’s, a small Upper East Side bar that was a hangout for the music and druggie crowd.

  After Libet and Andon said their vows, they checked into the Eloise Suite at the Plaza Hotel and celebrated with some twenty friends.

  It was, he says, “low key.”

  Later, the young marrieds—along with Pullis—vacationed together for two weeks in the Mexican resort city of Puerto Vallarta. “It was great fun,” recalls Andon.

  At the time, Pullis and his club had a reputation for always having a supply of cocaine available for friends and customers, according to Libet’s cousin Eric Ryan, who frequented JP’s. Pullis’s involvement with cocaine also was documented by Bob Woodward in Wired, his biography of John Belushi, who died of a drug overdose, and was also a chum of Pullis.

  JP’s had a very private gathering spot downstairs—“a kind of a secret room,” according to Ryan. “There was a fair amount of cocaine ingested in the place. Arma was there quite a bit, and Libet probably. On any given night you might run into Belushi, or people from the rock ’n’ roll world. I’d go in around closing time and play backgammon and drink brandy and snort coke with the bartender—all the bartenders were in the Social Register—until the sun came up. It was that kind of place.”

  Because of Andon’s career and lifestyle, he was considered by Libet’s brothers and cousins to be the coolest of who would be her five husbands. “That’s because Arma had a fun life,” observes Sale Johnson Rashad. “I loved Arma and he was great for Libet. He became the youngest vice president in charge of artists at Columbia. He had a great job and he was really good at his job.’”

  Libet was pregnant, or about to become pregnant when her brother Keith died of his cocaine overdose, and their brother Billy died in a motorcycle accident less than two months later. “There were people dropping like flies from overdoses,” Andon notes.

  Not long after those Johnson tragedies, another occurred, likely as a result of the first two.

  “We lost a child,” reveals Andon. “Libet had a miscarriage. It was really awful. There was a lot of stress. I was with her when she got both phone calls, that Keith, who I had never even met, and Billy had died. It was devastating—devastating. I don’t know how that family held up, especially Woody, because he had to become kind of the patriarch of the whole operation, and he still is. He made his own way. He was born into wealth, but he did pretty well on his own.”

  All told, Libet and Andon were together for “maybe three years—not the marriage, I mean the whole thing. Just because I married a rich girl, I continued to work. She did her thing and I did my thing.” He believes it ended because they were “too young” or “not a proper” match. He later rose to head of marketing at Columbia Records, and was instrumental in the careers of the likes of Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen.

  “My marriage to Libet was,” he states years later after remarrying and having a family, “a time that was fraught with drama and with tragedy, and there were times of just complete total fun and excitement. It was kind of a mixed bag.”

  * * *

  Next on Libet’s Hit Parade of husbands—number three—was far different from Andon.

  Waspy, tall, and with the look of the Marlboro Man, but with a Jay Leno chin, James “Jamie” Whitall had an MBA, had worked on Wall Street, was in the real estate and communications fields, and was later a mortgage broker. Libet, who was one of five children, had always wanted a big family herself. With Whitall, she had the first of what eventually would be four children, two girls and two boys with three of her five husbands.

  Their daughter, born around 1981, was Libet’s namesake—Elizabeth Ross Johnson Whitall—but was known as Lily, the great-great-granddaughter, like Casey Johnson, of Johnson & Johnson cofounder Robert Wood Johnson. Lily graduated from the New School and owned a swimwear company. In 2008, at twenty-seven, she married an animation artist in a ceremony officiated by a female interfaith minister at her mother’s sprawling estate in Millbrook, New York, the town where the uncle she never knew, Keith Johnson, had first tripped on LSD at Timothy Leary’s estate.

  By the time Libet’s marriage to Whitall ended, most members of the Johnson dynasty had lost track of who was fourth and who was fifth, they seemed to change so often.

  One of her next husbands was Christopher James Kennan, one of the four children of the diplomat and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian George F. Kennan, who developed America’s Cold War foreign policy. The senior Kennan, who died at 101 in 2005 at his home in Princeton, was considered an “elitist” who wrote an unpublished book asserting that blacks, women, and immigrants should be disenfranchised, according to a book by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas that was mentioned in Kennan’s Washington Post obituary.

  Chris Kennan, a Yale graduate, had been the personal assistant to David Rockefeller, and worked as a legislative liaison in the administration of New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne. With him, Libet had a son, Oliver, who became a musician. In October 1994, the tabloid New York Post reported in its Page Six gossip column—the same one that would break the news about Libet snagging Casey’s boyfriend—that “It’s splitsville” for Libet and Kennan. “Libet, sister of Woody Johnson IV, is said to have broken the news with a ‘Dear John’ letter to her spouse, explaining that the flame had gone out … Libet is keeping the apartment in River House and the estate in Millbrook.”

  Libet was said to have been living at the exclusive River House at the same time that Mary
Lea Johnson and Marty Richards were in residence.

  After Libet and Kennan were divorced, he remarried, but says many years later he’s still “very fond of my former wife, and of her brothers.”

  Another husband was Jonathan Teal, with whom Libet had two children, Annabel Johnson Teal and John Lansing-Johnson Teal.

  All of Libet’s husbands were said to have signed prenuptial agreements, just as Sale Johnson had done when she married Libet’s brother Woody, and as other men and women had done who had married into the Johnson dynasty over the years. Based on his cousin’s marital success rate batting average—0 for 5—Eric Ryan wryly asserts, “Libet should have had a whole stack of prenups in her bedside table because she could not stay married. She has the inability to find happiness. The matrimonial bar lost a great client when Libet stopped marrying and divorcing.”

  He recalls attending a Christmas party with his then wife at Libet’s in the early 2000s and Libet, “sort of giggling, said, ‘I don’t know how the two of you do it—still together after all this time,’ and that was basically her greeting to us, being totally shocked that we were still together.” In early 2011, however, Ryan and his wife—they had a young adult daughter—were in the process of getting a divorce, which was later finalized.

  One of Libet’s problems was that she attempted to turn each of her husbands into some ideal of what the perfect husband should be.

  “She would find these men and then change them—re-dress them, redirect them, and then she controlled them,” a family member asserts. “But then they weren’t what she wanted anymore because in the end she didn’t really want to be controlling her husband, so then she was unhappy. It was a combination of being spoiled and domineering and controlling. She loves her kids, but she never really found what she wanted in a man.”

  Former sister-in-law Sale Johnson liked and respected Libet and thought she was “a very cool person. She’s smart. She’s clever. She has a great sense of style and exquisite taste. But she did like to party—and she had a lot of issues.”