Those issues resulted in Libet going into rehab, or as Ryan notes, “She has had a couple of runs through Betty Ford. But Libet was never as publicly a train wreck as Casey,” he adds. “It was more things like forgetting expensive jewelry in taxi cabs.”
When Libet was pregnant and married to John Teal he was said to have told her that if she didn’t go into rehab he would divorce her and take their child, so she checked into the Betty Ford Center.
“While Libet was in rehab John, Woody, his wife Sale, and Libet’s mother and I think her husband, Doug, flew out there,” recounts a relative. “They met with Libet’s counselor and they all were asked how they felt about being there. I was told that when they got to Sale she said she never drank and never took drugs, and that now she was in a room full of alcoholics and drug addicts, and didn’t like being there. Libet was furious. She said she was embarrassed that she needed the treatment, and that she was especially embarrassed that her sister-in-law Sale was there to hear about her problems because she felt Sale lived on a pedestal and everything she touched turned to gold.”
Years later, Sale Johnson says she never realized that her sister-in-law “had any real problems because she didn’t ever do much with us. We got together mainly for family things, but she did things with her friends, and I think she didn’t really want Woody to know about her social life.”
* * *
After her last divorce, the petite, blond Libet Johnson, a jet-setter with a flamboyant lifestyle, had a number of boyfriends—brief romances that put her and them in boldface in the gossip pages. Among them were the singer Michael Bolton; the actor Michael Nouri; the hairdresser to the stars in New York, Frederic Fekkai (who Casey gleefully told Vanity Fair dumped her aunt and “she was devastated”). Libet reportedly also became involved with a dashing Frenchman, Jerome Jeandin, who was her chauffeur when she stayed at the chicest hotel in Paris, the Ritz, where Princess Diana was in residence before she was killed. It was reported that when Libet dropped Jeandin, she sent him off with a gift—a fire engine red Ferrari valued at a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
But it was Libet’s relationship with a weight-loss doctor from Trinidad by the name of Lionel Bissoon that sparked an embarrassing story in New York magazine just eighteen months after Casey’s very embarrassing tell-all about Libet in Vanity Fair.
The story, entitled “Libet in Love,” included among the photographs one of a 1998 oil painting commissioned by the Johnson heiress of herself, tastefully, but seductively reclining on a chaise wearing, as the magazine pointed out, “a stunning Valentino dress of chiffon, silk, and diamonds … hiked toward her knees, ruffles cascading carelessly to the leopard-skin rug on the floor … It’s the portrait of a seductress.”
The making of the portrait of Libet Johnson became more of a two-year, sometimes infuriating saga than a series of routine sittings, the society portraitist James Childs recalls in late 2012, fourteen years after he completed his final brush stroke of her in bewitching repose.
“I don’t know what she is—a pearl in an oyster, or whatever it is”—is how the artist, looking back at the project, curiously characterizes his difficult model-client as she is depicted on canvas.
Childs wasn’t the first painter of the rich and famous whom Libet had sought out to mythologize her in oils. If First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy could choose Aaron Shikler—once described as the “Gilbert Stuart of the jet set”—to immortalize her in a renowned official portrait that prominently hangs in the Vermeil Room of the White House along with those he did of Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton, well, he was certainly good enough for Libet, who saw herself as one of the glamorous first ladies of the Johnson dynasty. Shikler’s portrait, however, was rather odd, to Childs’s classicist artist eyes. “The painting was huge and Libet’s barefoot in a long black dress, peeking around a doorway. I don’t love it, and I think it was really a silly idea. The bare feet—and she has very small feet—was a ridiculous conceit for a woman like her.”
Along with Libet commissioning Childs to paint her, she also had him do a portrait of one of her four children, teenager Lily, around the same time, in the mid-1990s. It was a huge, life-size rendition—“it’s very beautiful,” he boasts—with the child standing on a faux granite stand, made by her mother’s people. As Childs describes the “simple and straightforward” portrait, for which Libet had paid a cool fifty thousand dollars (plus more for preliminary sketches), “Lily’s a princess on a pedestal,” he says, chuckling.
The Childs-Johnson relationship, which would end badly, had started on a high note when she telephoned him “out of the blue,” circa 1996, saying, “I’ve seen your work. I love artists, I love working with artists.” Still, he had no idea who she was because “she stays a little bit below the radar as much as she can.” Since he knew a lot of the people she knew—he’d previously done a portrait of her wealthy socialite chum, Carolyne Roehm, who was the second wife of billionaire Wall Street titan Henry Kravitz, and one of another of Libet’s acquaintances, the super-rich media mogul Christopher “Kip” Forbes, Malcolm’s son—he made a few calls.
“I said this woman called me, who is that? And they said, oh, gosh, she’s one of the richest people, she’s a powerful woman.”
Childs’s contract with the heiress required that she pose six times “in person” at his studio for three hours at a time, eighteen hours in all—“they have to pose for me no matter who they think they are.” But the project would drag on and on, take months and months to complete, because of her demanding ways.
Libet, it appeared, tended to seek out as friends people who worked for her, or with her, and James Childs was no exception.
Immediately, she “tried to pull” him into her social circle. She invited him to dinner parties with guests that included her interior decorator to the socially wealthy Greg Jordan—once described as having a “well-mannered approach and a knack for befriending the right people”—with whom Libet often travelled and had as a walker, and who, Childs says, “she was crazy about” until his death at forty-eight. Another was former National Academy of Design director John Dobkin, who was married to a Habsburg princess, and for whom Childs once worked. Others in the circle included the actor Matthew Modine and his wife, plus a bevy of Manhattan socialites.
Childs was a guest for one of Libet’s glitzy, very discreet soirees—with a dee-jay, dancing, dinner, and a sail around Manhattan island—aboard the Sea Prince, the beautiful sailing vessel that she had taken over after the drug death of her brother, Keith, many years earlier. The artist also escorted her, and some of her four children, to movies such as The Birdcage, a comedy about a drag queen and a gay cabaret owner.
Despite all of her wealth, her relatively large brood of four from her five marriages, her many acquaintances, her constant entertaining, there was something sad about her, Childs felt. Like Roger Ricco, her art gallery partner back in the ’70s, the artist thought Libet Johnson “was like a tiny, little lonely person. One of the things that made me feel that she might be kind of a lonely woman was the fact that she always had children with everybody. It made me feel like there was a void somewhere in her life. A lot of women like her who are very conscious of their looks would never have all those children.”
She once asked Childs to take her to lunch at the trendy downtown Manhattan restaurant Balthazar, and they were chauffeured there in her gleaming Bentley. “She kept saying she was starving, but then she ate hardly anything. I had a glass of wine with lunch and I said, ‘Would you like something to drink?’ She said, ‘I’d love to have a glass of wine, but not today.’ And then I remembered that she had alluded to the fact that there was a [drinking] problem before.
“She was very straightforward. She told me about all that, the cocaine and alcohol, and mentioned rehab. She just said she had straightened herself out. She was open about when she was sort of involved with substances. I think she wanted me to know that she had lived, and had overcome.”
Through it all
he learned much about the very private, very rich Band-Aid heiress, and how she perceived herself, that helped him in the painting of her, dubbed “Lady X,” in the tradition of Madame X, the artist John Singer Sargent’s late-nineteenth-century portrait of a notorious and beautiful young socialite, on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City.
“Having spent time with Libet, I began to see that she thought of herself as a very sensual, very seductive woman,” he asserts. “I learned from being around her kind of how she perceived herself, and how she tried to act around men. I don’t know how attractive she thinks she is, but I know that she does feel like she wants men in her life.” But Childs himself didn’t find her to be sexy as other men had. “She’s a plain woman, really. She looks good when she’s put together, but she has a rather average face. She keeps her figure, and she’s careful about all those things.”
When he began the painting process he noted that she had a very large bosom courtesy, he believed, of breast implants, but that soon changed. “She took them out during the process. I don’t know if it was because of a boyfriend, or it was just her own mood at the time. She had the implants and was busty, but in the end she had about half of that [measurement].”
At the time, in her mid-forties, she was romantically involved with a twenty-five-year-old boy from Argentina who was working in finance, but that affair soon ended, according to Childs. “He was an intern or something in a bank, or in Wall Street, and was a well-brought-up boy from a wealthy family, and she went to Argentina to meet his family and I guess they gave her the cold shoulder,” recalls Childs. “I don’t know if they put the kibosh on it, but they weren’t happy to see her, and it ended. It was one of those things that wasn’t going to go anywhere.”
While the Johnson heiress professed an avid interest in art, she seemed to have little knowledge of it and a rather questionable level of taste, Childs discovered. What she did have, though, was an endless checkbook to buy whatever suited her at the moment, whether or not it was worthy.
“I don’t think she was finished, as they used to say at the turn of the century when a woman was schooled a certain way and had a drawing master and a dancing master. I think she picked up things as she went along, and she probably found out about [gracious] things from her interior decorator. The Vanderbilt girls, for instance, were very educated. It was taken seriously to prepare these women. It didn’t seem that Libet had any of that. She wasn’t really a refined woman in those ways.
“She’d have a Sotheby’s catalogue and she’d say to me, ‘What about these paintings?’ that she intended to buy. But she didn’t particularly seem to know much about painting, and some of them were not very good.”
For her portrait, Libet had a number of demands, things Childs had never before experienced as portraitist of the wealthy. For one, she wanted an entire set built in his studio to accommodate the look she was hoping for, and certain possessions that she had. The leopard skin rug in the painting had come from a jungle cat she said her father claimed he had bagged on a safari, part of that collection he had in his study in Florida. The skin as it turned out was too small for the proportions of the painting—“she looked like she was on a magic carpet, and it just looked stupid”—so he had to spend six weeks to turn it into a bigger rug, just to draw and execute it.
The silk, brown in color, her favorite, that was hung in the background of the portrait came from Fortuny, purveyor of the most expensive fabric money can buy, hand-made in Venice, which arrived at the studio at a cost of about six thousand dollars. The Valentino dress she wore, which also cost thousands, had been selected by Childs from Libet’s “incredible” closet of clothes. The mahogany wainscoting on the wall was built by her carpenters, and another of her paid minions did the faux finish.
In order to give the portrait something of the look of a famous painting done in 1800 and housed in the Louvre, that of glamorous French socialite Jeanne-Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier, who posed reclining on a chaise, Libet ordered two from high-end Manhattan antiques purveyor Kentshire, sent over to Childs’s studio for his selection. The one she posed on was Napoleonic, and “must have cost her a fortune,” states Childs.
“She had all this stuff sent to my studio and after I’d arranged it and edited it, I said to her, ‘Well, how do you envision the painting?’ And she said, ‘Oh, life size.’ I said, ‘No, Libet,’ and she just looked at me like—how dare you! She’s not used to being contradicted.”
He explained to her that the picture would have so much detail and precious things in it—jewels and satins—that it had to be painted like a Dutch master, like a Vermeer, which is how it ended up, in Childs’s estimation. Even though she had brought in her makeup artist, her photographer, and her hairdresser to make her look glamorous—and she did—they battled over some aspects of her look as he was painting, such as her nose, which she claimed resembled that of a prizefighter. “That wasn’t a good day,” he recalls. “She’s tough and demanding, but I will change anything that doesn’t affect the artistic quality.” She got the nose she wanted.
But not the negligée that she wanted to pose in, according to Childs.
“She actually talked about that at one point.” Childs refused to permit it.
Another time, Libet appeared at the studio with three or four very expensive antique frames from Lowy, the fanciest in New York, which she wanted for the portrait. She asked him to choose one. “I said for what, and she said, ‘Well, for the painting.’ And I said that I didn’t believe in putting modern paintings—even if they are classical—in an antique frame. She said, ‘Well, you have to choose one of them, and I can have it cut down in any way you want.’”
Childs was shocked.
“I wouldn’t have destroyed a seventeenth-century Italian masterpiece of a frame in order to change the size of it, but she was willing to.”
Instead, he chose one that was the proper size. He learned that it had cost Libet sixty thousand dollars—the same fee that she had paid Childs for his two years of work.
“That was kind of sobering,” he says, reflecting back to that time. “It shows what I was worth to her. I was no better than a frame. I was just another supernumerary in her life. It was a slap in the face.”
The portrait of Elizabeth Ross “Libet” Johnson was finally completed in 1998, but almost a decade and a half later Childs had no idea where, or if, she had hung it.
“The painting was picked up and that was it,” he says. “I never heard another word from her. She never thanked me. She never said she liked it. Nothing. I knocked myself out over that painting, and it wasn’t just because it was her, because that doesn’t matter so much to me. It’s really because I had the opportunity to paint a certain kind of picture that I had never done before, and I was determined to render everything as beautiful as possible and say something. The point of view is like a six-foot man looking at her who’s entered the room and she’s in all her beauty. It’s a masterpiece, a fabulous painting. I consider it my best work, and I know it’s how she sees herself.”
Footnote: In the summer of 2003, the New York Times critic John Leland contacted James Childs for a lengthy, complimentary profile in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section. The Times wanted to illustrate the story with some of Childs’s work, and the first piece to cross his mind was his portrait of Libet Johnson.
“As a gentleman,” he says, he called her, knowing her propensity for privacy, but also noting that he holds the copyright to the painting and has the right to have it reproduced in positive ways, and because he thought it was so wonderful. “I said, ‘Libet, I’d really like to use your picture in the Times,’ and she didn’t even reply to me in person. She had her secretary say no, and gave no reason, except that she’s very private and didn’t want the painting reproduced in the newspaper.
He calls her response, or lack thereof, “high-handed” and “unreasonable.”
However, when New York magazine approached him to use a photo of th
e portrait in its “Libet in Love” story, he gave permission, along with charging a licensing fee of $650.
He heard nothing from Libet. “I think she knew by then that I was irritated with her.”
The story in New York itself focused on Libet and Lionel Bissoon’s curious romantic and passionate, at least at first, relationship. It also detailed the heiress’s adoption of a six-month-old orphan in Cambodia, where she had generously and compassionately established an orphanage, Sovann Komar, in the suburbs of Pnohm Penh. And the piece described the couple’s bitter custody battle. Bissoon thought the boy would be his, or shared with Libet; she thought otherwise, took control of him, and even established a one-hundred-thousand-dollar trust fund for the boy, whom she named William.
Unlike Casey, who cooperated with Vanity Fair, Libet, as was her style, refused to talk with New York’s writer, Steve Fishman—at least on the record. Most if not all of the story that was pitched to the magazine by Bissoon’s publicist had come from his side, such as the romantic e-mails between the two that were leaked. Those from Libet were signed “DG,” for the nickname she had given herself—Dancing Girl.
Anything telling Libet’s side of the story came from a short list of names of her trusted friends that Libet herself had supplied to Fishman, among them her best pal from childhood, Lucinda Ziesing. She was quoted as saying, “Cambodia had become her life’s work. It’s given her meaning, direction.” One of Libet’s daughters, Annabel, told the magazine that Bissoon “talked about how he wanted to do this thing with his guru where they bury you up to your neck and you go through these spiritual trials. I’m sorry, that is entertaining stuff.” The story said that Annabel had come to “hate Lionel.”
Several years later, Ziesing calls the New York piece “terrible” and says that Libet was “very unhappy” with it. “I mean she got herself in trouble and got with Bissoon.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 40