Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Facing eviction, Casey moved out, and found new lodging—what would be her next to final stop—in the luxurious, gated, and private two-bedroom West Hollywood guesthouse at 910 North Orlando Avenue, owned by Nancy Stoddart, a longtime acquaintance of Casey’s mother.

  A decorator, Stoddart was another one of those older women whom Casey had adopted as a sort of surrogate mother, like Diandra Douglas, Kathy Hilton, and New York socialite Susan Gutfreund, a former stewardess who also married into money, and who lived in the Johnsons’ Park Avenue building.

  Casey’s rent at Stoddart’s house was paid for by a sympathetic male former tenant, according to Sale.

  Sale had first met Stoddart when she and Woody moved to New York. She had seen a portrait of someone’s dogs and thought it was exquisite, and was told that Nancy Stoddart was the artist. Sale invited Stoddart to the Johnsons’ Fifth Avenue apartment, gave her photographs of her four schnauzers, and Nancy later returned with a lovely portrait. Subsequently, Sale had her paint the son of her first golden retriever.

  Like Casey, Stoddart moved to Los Angeles—where she started an interior design company.

  “Casey was out and about out there and somehow Nancy met Casey and she told Casey that we were good friends,” says Sale, “and so Casey thought that she was being friends with my friend. At one point I said to Casey that she should be spending time with people her own age. I just thought it wasn’t normal, but Nancy, I guess, was nice to her. Nancy came to Ava’s first birthday party, which I gave at my house in Southampton.”

  Stoddart saw herself as a writer and was said to have been working on a memoir, dealing in part with all the famous people she knew, so it was natural that she was intrigued with the Johnson & Johnson heiress. Stoddart clearly liked to dish about the celebrities she knew, such as Oprah Winfrey. She was quoted by Oprah’s biographer Kitty Kelley as saying, “When we went skiing together, Oprah was so fat she had to buy her ski clothes in the men’s department.”

  * * *

  December 2009 was a bizarre month in Casey’s increasingly bizarre life. Jasmine Lennard, for one, charged that Casey had broken into her Hollywood apartment and had stolen shoes, jewelry, pages from a legal document, and underwear. The New York Post, in a story headlined “Heiress in Theft Scandal,” reported, “The thief also left a bizarre calling card—a used vibrator was found in her bed and a wet towel was on the floor. Lennard suspected Johnson, whom she said had ‘been like a little sister to me.’ Then she got a text message from Johnson’s off-again, on-again girlfriend, Courtenay Semel. ‘There’s a problem, Jaz, Casey just got into bed with me and she is wearing your underwear. You need to call the police…’”

  As a result, the emotionally disturbed heiress was arrested and was held for twenty thousand dollars bail. The skeletal-looking Lennard—who craved media attention and thrived on controversy that got her picture in the celebrity media and name in boldface—took credit for being Casey’s savior, while at the same time accusing her of the break-in.

  She was quoted in the Post as saying, “Since the day I met Casey, I have only been a good force in her life. I tried to get her off drugs and alcohol. I tried to get her in a twelve-step program. I tried to take care of her daughter. I’ve given her money. I am the only person who helped this girl…”

  After Casey was released from jail facing charges of grand theft, she adamantly denied Lennard’s accusations. By then she had retained the prominent Los Angeles attorney Robert Shapiro, who had been part of the successful O. J. Simpson defense team.

  Around the same time, Casey got into what was reported to be a “vicious catfight” with Semel who allegedly “beat the crap out of her, and then she lit her hair on fire. Casey had to be hospitalized,” according to press reports. Semel would later boast to People magazine that Casey was “the love of my life.”

  It only got more crazy.

  In the last weeks of December 2009, in one of her more outlandish, publicity-generating episodes, Casey had gone public with the bisexual reality TV personality and exhibitionist Tila Tequila, who boasted—with the two posing together for the paparazzi, and even kissing—that they were going to get married, and that Casey had given her a rock of an engagement ring. She called Casey her “Wifey.”

  Back east her father and other members of the Johnson dynasty cringed. With all of the past Johnson dynastic scandals through the generations, this was one of the most publicly shameful and humiliating because of the worldwide media and 24/7 Internet coverage.

  A number of media outlets reported that Casey was gay because of her very public relationships with Tequila and Courtenay Semel. The New York Daily News had once described Casey as a “beautiful blond lesbian,” but her mother adamantly denies that her daughter was gay, and scoffs that she might even have been bisexual “by any means.” Her interpretation is that Casey “was very needy and couldn’t be alone and at that point in her life it was very difficult to keep it together so that a nice man was going to want to be with her.”

  A relative concurs.

  “The whole lesbian thing was something that she fell in with, with other of her acquaintances in California who were bisexual in that fast-partying crowd. Casey never expressed any interest in gay relationships up until that point. It was sort of an affectation she found to be attractive for its shock value because she liked to stick it to her family.”

  * * *

  As the 2009 Christmas and New Year’s holidays approached, Tila Tequila left Los Angeles to spend time with her family. Left alone in her rented guesthouse, Casey’s very fragile emotional and physical state was fast deteriorating. She had all but stopped taking her insulin, she was eating junk food, and swigging Nyquil in order to sleep. She also had started communicating via Twitter and Facebook with her friends and those in the outside world who were following her increasingly sordid real-life soap opera that was being played out in the tabloids and online.

  On Christmas Day she wrote, “I was very lucky this year.” Three days later, she declared, “I’m in heaven … Happy as a clam xo.” And her final one said, “sweet dream everyone … I’m getting a new car … Any ideas? Cant b a two seater cause we have a daughter … sedan, sports car, suv??”

  From what was known, she spent New Year’s Eve, when she usually was out partying, alone in bed.

  Around eleven thirty on the morning of January 4, 2010, when Casey didn’t respond to knocks on her door, someone entered and found her unconscious. For Woody, who got the terrible news later in the day, it was like reliving the discovery of his brother Keith, dead of a drug overdose, more than three decades earlier.

  Shortly before noon, Pacific time, a 911 call was placed by an unidentified female from Casey’s residence on Nancy Stoddart’s estate once known as “Grumblenot.”

  “She’s ice-cold and her hands are turning blue,” stated the caller. “I have two other people here with me and we all think she’s dead. I don’t know if it’s suicide. Very often her medication gets all screwed up, so it’s probably that.”

  Paramedics arrived shortly thereafter.

  At the age of thirty, the Johnson & Johnson heiress whose life had been both a Cinderella fantasy and a living hell was pronounced dead on the scene.

  It was around three o’clock on the East Coast when Sale Johnson’s iPhone rang and the caller ID displayed Nancy Stoddart’s L.A. number. Casey’s friend and landlord was personally relaying the tragic news that she was dead.

  “The fire-rescue people were still there and I talked to them, too,” says Sale, recalling that horrific day.

  Sale then called Woody, who had kept his distance from Casey for at least five years, but was naturally devastated when her end came. He later termed her death, “the worst day of my life” in a lifetime of many tragic days.

  A month before Casey died, Dr. Ed Saltzman had had dinner with Sale and Ahmad Rashad in Florida. From what Sale had confided to him, he says, “Casey’s death was imminent. It was a foregone conclusion.”


  When word of Casey’s death reached the outside world, the media jumped on the story. There were unsubstantiated reports that Casey had died of a drug overdose, or had committed suicide, and that she had been living in filth.

  But Sale Johnson, wanting to set the record straight, declares, “My daughter did not die in squalor, not with rats, not with trash.”

  One of London’s Fleet Street newspapers had reported that Casey had “no water, electricity or gas” and that “dirty dishes were piled in the kitchen and the pool was a rat-infested swamp.” The New York Post filled the front page with an eerie photo of Casey Johnson in a virginal white gown holding the leash of one of her dogs with the giant headline “Poor Little Rich Girl. Casey’s Tragic Fall into Squalor,” and inside was another headline that declared: “Heiress Lived Amid Rats and Trash.” Another blared: “WOODY’S ANGUISH AS LOST GIRL DIED ALONE.”

  But there were no words from her father who had abandoned her.

  The Post’s lead story, similar in content to front-page accounts around the world, began: “Tragic baby-shampoo heiress Casey Johnson spent the last months of her life in a suicidal drug haze, living in squalor, surrounded by hangers-on and cut off from the family fortune…”

  Almost three years after Casey’s death, her mother was still angry at how the media portrayed her daughter’s last days.

  “Casey’s painful death and the absurdity of the so-called medical experts and the Emmy-winning talk show hosts and award-winning journalists all had not one clue as to the real workings of Casey’s life,” declares Sale Johnson Rashad. “Not one of them knew she had no drugs in her body. Not one of them knew she had a mental health issue [borderline personality disorder] that ruled her life and her behavior, and that because of that illness her behavior was erratic and could easily have been misconstrued.

  “The press that followed her passing was out of control. Not one journalist, or self-claimed expert on Casey’s life, ever tried to reach me. Woody’s extensive and powerful PR machine put out their statements, [but] they never mentioned a word about her illness [BPD]. That was a huge mistake. It was all so painful, and so untrue.”

  All kinds of people who were part of the Johnson circle were quoted as saying what a tragedy her death was, and what a sad figure the poor little rich girl had been throughout her life. Michael Douglas, whose son Cameron might have turned Casey on to drugs, and whose ex-wife, Diandra, had helped Casey with her ill-fated adoption, curiously described himself as “a distant relative,” but a “dear, dear friend” of Woody. He told reporters Casey’s death was “a terrible, terrible tragedy.… It’s the worst thing that could happen to anyone, losing a child. They’re grieving, as one would expect.”

  Arrangements were immediately made to have her body flown east for a private funeral. Her family issued a statement, through Woody Johnson’s public relations firm, asking “for a measure of privacy over the next several days as they mourn their loss.”

  The very private funeral, with about forty in attendance, was held in Princeton, and family members and other invited mourners were instructed to first meet at Woody Johnson’s mother’s house.

  “We really didn’t know how to behave because it wasn’t scripted, or formulated,” says a family member. “Betty, who’s pretty stoic, pretty tough, was kind of in charge, and she just orchestrated it, having had a lot of experience with death in the family.”

  It was Betty May Wold Johnson Gillespie Bushnell, the family member said, who made the decision (with Woody and Sale’s consent) that Casey should be buried in the same small plot in Princeton where the Johnson dynasty matriarch’s sons, Keith and Billy, had been interred some thirty-five years earlier.

  “I’m very close to Betty,” asserts Sale Johnson Rashad, “and I think that’s where Casey would have wanted to be. That was her family.”

  Sale had arrived with her husband, Ahmad, and she had invited Casey’s beloved Jamaican nanny, Milly, along with Ava’s godmother, Nicky Hilton, and another close friend of Casey’s, the sometimes model and actress Bijou Phillips, a hard-partying high school dropout who was the daughter of John Phillips of the sixties group The Mamas & the Papas. In Casey’s last days, Hilton and Phillips had rescued two of Casey’s dogs, her furs, and some other personal belongings after a brief confrontation with Tila Tequila.

  “The whole day was a blur,” recalls a family member. “Betty tried to keep people on their good behavior” because there was some animosity among those in attendance. Casey’s father, Woody, for instance, had arrived with his second wife, Suzanne, “against the begging and pleading” of Casey’s sisters, Jaime and Daisy, who disliked her.

  Casey’s service—her body was in a closed casket—was held at the cemetery and presided over by a minister who, it was believed, hadn’t actually known the Johnson family, or for very long.

  “This guy was a stranger as best as I could tell,” says one of the mourners. “He gave the eulogy—and it was freaking bitter cold at the gravesite—and he was there being supportive and helping out with the family, who was distraught, and sort of confused, and saddened about this terrible tragedy.”

  It took a grieving Woody Johnson almost three weeks before he said something publicly about losing his daughter. “There’s no way to bring her back. I wish I could change it, but I can’t. I think of [Casey’s death] all the time. It’s been a seesaw in terms of [grieving and] the business of the team.”

  Five days after his firstborn died, he had gone to Cincinnati for the Jets wildcard playoff game against the Bengals. “I thought, ‘Geez, it would be kind of weird if I had asked the players to come to play a game after they had tragedy in their family and I don’t come,’ so I had to do it.”

  After the Jets won, Coach Rex Ryan gave his boss the game ball and “that was just too many things hitting me at once,” said Woody. While the Jets never won the playoffs, he gave the ball to his namesake from his second marriage. “He loves it. He’s only three and a half but he thinks it’s pretty good.”

  It took a month for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office to issue its final report on “Coroner Case Number 2010-00090—JOHNSON, Sale Trotter Case.” It ruled that her “natural death” was the result of “diabetic ketoacidosis,” which was a complication of her diabetes and inadequate insulin. Neither cocaine nor alcohol were detected.

  “The decedent had seen a psychiatrist in the past,” the report noted, “but that physician has been out of town. On the Thursday before her death she had been evaluated by another psychiatrist and he had concluded that she was not suicidal. The family’s attorney had requested that the decedent be evaluated by the psychiatrist as part of the process in reuniting the decedent with her family.”

  Some two months after Casey died, Woody Johnson told a reporter who covered the Jets for The New York Times that his long-estranged daughter had been “trying to find her own identity. She was rebellious. She made some judgment errors. Been there, done that. She had to take responsibility. And it couldn’t be me pushing. Or her mother. Or her doctor. She would ultimately have to do it herself.”

  EPILOGUE

  For Sale Johnson, who continued to use her famous dynastic last name, and her second husband, Ahmad Rashad, life for some of the second decade of the 2000s was all about travel, golf tournaments, her adult daughter Daisy’s equestrian activities, and most of all raising her adoptive granddaughter, Ava-Monroe—who turned six years old in 2012—in their gated estate in South Florida.

  “Ava’s the most beguiling creature on this planet,” declares a joyous Sale. “She’s just a freak of nature. She’s just happy and smart, and so up for anything. Life is an adventure. Ahmad loves her. The biggest smile I ever see on his face—which used to be when he saw me—is when he sees Ava and she comes running when he walks into the house. She squeals, Daddy, and runs and jumps on him. How can you not love that?”

  Since both Sale and Ahmad were in their sixties, they planned to raise the child “day by day,” says Sale. “My pla
n was that she would live with Jaime, but Jaime wasn’t ready to raise a child.”

  While cute Ava Monroe was a joy to bring up, all was not copacetic in the house of Johnson-Rashad. There had been serious relationship issues between Woody Johnson’s ex-wife and her ex–football star second husband for some time, and by the winter of 2013 their six-year marriage appeared to be seriously in trouble, according to family members and confidants.

  The primary issue of contention was money—wealth earned and unearned—the usual reason for problems among Johnson dynasty members. In the Sale Johnson–Ahmad Rashad matter, it was mostly about her millions that were far, far greater than any money he might have had.

  “Even before they were married, there was concern that Ahmad was marrying somebody who was significantly wealthier than he, and that maybe he wouldn’t have done so had she not been so wealthy as a result of her divorce settlement with Woody,” maintains a close family member. “Sale expressed that concern herself. But she sort of swept it under the rug during the excitement of the courtship and engagement and wedding.”

  After they were married, Sale herself complained to her long-time confidant, Dr. Ed Saltzman, that “Ahmad was very demanding, and that she had to buy this, she had to buy that,” he clearly recalls. “She told me that he wanted a certain watch when they were in Europe and that it cost about ten thousand dollars, and she bought it for it for him, and she was pissed off about it. I asked her why she bought it, why she just didn’t say no, and she said, ‘Eddie, oh, you know…’” But never gave him a direct reason.

  However, close observers of Sale’s second marriage had no reason to believe that Rashad was, in any way, a gold digger, which was always a concern within the Johnson dynasty about future wives and husbands, and sometimes rightfully so.

  As one close source notes: “Ahmad didn’t approach his relationship and marriage with Sale with malice aforethought, intending to enrich himself. He wasn’t planning on stealing her fortune and putting his family or hangers-on in villas in Monaco. He probably just wanted to spend and live a fast life without being fiscally responsible, which is very in contrast to Sale’s sort of core values. She’s very frugal, in spite of the fact that she lives in an insane sort of manner with her money.”