He predicted “greater success going forward.”
The New York Post declared, “Shame on Johnson” for “cowering behind a lame, prepared statement.” As for saving head coach Ryan, the tabloid’s headline blared: “STAY OF REXECUTION.”
The consensus in the sports media was that sacking Sanchez and Ryan would be too costly for Woody, about $15 million. But for a billionaire whose divorce settlement with his first wife was an astronomical $100 million (if her father’s boast was to be believed), the cost of splitting from his quarterback and head coach would be a mere bag of shells for the Band-Aid heir.
As the boss, Woody had every right to sack Ryan for overseeing two miserable seasons. But on an emotional level, perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger because when he was in his teens he had witnessed his father being unceremoniously fired as president of Johnson & Johnson by Woody’s grandfather. Besides recalling how hurtful it was, Woody personally had much affection for Ryan, whose earthy personality and physical type reminded him of his late father.
Nine days into the new year, Woody, joined by Ryan, faced the sports media a few hours after it was announced that Tony Sparano had been canned, the second sacrificial lamb sacked and blamed for the team’s dysfunction since the firing of Tannenbaum.
Surprisingly, after two terrible losing seasons, Ryan was his same old blustery self, bragging that the Jets “are going to be a dangerous football team. You’re not going to want to play the New York Jets.”
And Woody fondly showed his appreciation for Ryan, declaring, “I have ultimate confidence in Rex as a head coach, as a leader, as a motivator, as a play caller.”
The whole curious scene came under intense criticism again by the media, and more Jets circus acts were expected in 2013.
Nearing his seventieth year, Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV surely knew he would have to revamp his team if he ever wanted to win his first Super Bowl, which, no doubt, would be the crowning glory of his Johnson dynasty legacy.
And on April 29, 2013, Tebow’s time was up. He was booted in favor of a draft pick.
* * *
Back in 1943, when Woody’s grandfather, General Johnson, penned “Our Credo,” the Johnson & Johnson anthem and mission statement, the company, which was booming and about to go public, was already one of the world’s most respected in the health-care products business.
It would one day be described as the “gold standard” for American corporations.
The credo had hung on the wall of Woody Johnson’s office for sentimental reasons many decades after his grandfather had written it, and many years after his father, as president, had become the last of the Johnson dynasty to help run the family business.
Among the eloquent and sincere credo’s words were these:
“We believe our first responsibility is to … mothers and fathers and all others who use our products … everything we do must be of high quality…”
But, by the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the company, begun by Woody’s great-grandfather and his two brothers in the late nineteenth century, found itself under a dark cloud.
Behemoth Johnson & Johnson, which had made Woody and other members of the dynasty all so wealthy through trust funds, bequeaths, and platinum Johnson & Johnson stock holdings, found itself dealing with scandals related to a number of its products, and the way it did some of its business.
Virtually overnight, the company’s long-held promise “of high quality” was being seriously questioned by consumer groups, government agencies, and retail customers.
In April 2012, for example, the company and a subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, was fined a whopping $1.2 billion—the biggest ever in a state fraud case—after an Arkansas jury decided that it had hidden or trivialized the dangers of the antischizophrenia drug Risperdal. Similar cases involving the drug had earlier been settled for hundreds of millions of dollars in Texas, South Carolina, and Louisiana.
As The New York Times noted in the wake of the Arkansas case, “Consumer confidence in Johnson & Johnson, once one of the most trusted brands, has dropped in recent years as the company recalled dozens of products, including millions of bottles of children’s Tylenol and other medications, as well as artificial hips and other products.”
One of those in question was an artificial hip device called the Articular Surface Replacement (ARS), which was being marketed by a Johnson & Johnson division at a time when the company allegedly knew that it had a 40 percent failure rate. As a result, some ten thousand lawsuits were filed by people who had had the device implanted. In early 2013, the first trial in the case was set to begin in a California court, and the outcome was expected to have a major impact on the company.
The General, who had had such obsessive hands-on control when he ran the company and penned the credo, must have been spinning in his grave.
There hadn’t been product scandals within Johnson & Johnson of such headline-making magnitude since 1983 when a homicidal maniac laced Tylenol Extra-Strength Capsules with the poison cyanide. Seven people who had bought eight bottles of the over-the-counter medication in the Chicago area had died. At the time, it was considered Johnson & Johnson’s “darkest hour … someone was using our brand as a vehicle for murder,” stated Lawrence Foster, who was then the corporate PR vice president who helped manage the company’s emergency response.
Following the General’s credo to safeguard its customers, Johnson & Johnson immediately took the capsules off of the market and replaced them with another, safe tablet called a “caplet” that made tampering impossible. The killer, however, was never found, only an extortionist, an out-of-work accountant, was arrested for demanding one million dollars to “stop the killing.”
But the tragic Tylenol case had nothing to do with the manner in which Johnson & Johnson did business or manufactured products in the 2000s.
When a new chief executive by the name of Alex Gorsky was promoted in 2012—he was a former pharmaceutical sales representative and company insider—he pledged to rebuild consumer confidence following the slew of government investigations, recalls of various products, and serious manufacturing glitches.
Looking to the future he declared:
“The events over the last couple of years have had a negative impact, but we’ve been, I think, encouraged by how resilient our brands and our company reputation have been …
“I think we’re going to need to be bold, disciplined and decisive,” the fifty-one-year-old Gorsky intoned.
That was just the way Woody’s grandfather Robert Wood Johnson Jr., the General, had run the company almost seven decades earlier—he was very bold, he was very disciplined, and he was very decisive. But his “Our Credo” seemed to have been all but forgotten in the early years of the twenty-first century, even though—engraved in limestone, it was prominently displayed in the lobby of the New Brunswick headquarters—and appeared as engravings on desktops, and on walls throughout the massive building.
As Stephen A. Greyser, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School told a reporter for the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press newspaper in a 2011 story that was picked up by USA Today’s Web site under the headline “Woes for Johnson & Johnson”:
“… one has to conclude that the corporate culture wasn’t—and maybe isn’t—as strongly embracing of the principles of the credo as used to be the case.”
At the 2012 Johnson & Johnson shareholders meeting, Johnson family members who held a ton of company stock, but had no more involvement in running the 125-year-old worldwide business, made their displeasure known regarding the ills of the health-care company founded by their forebears. They did so with their purse strings.
“The family got together and voted against the executive compensation package that management was trying to put forward,” says Eric Ryan who, like Woody Johnson, was of the fourth generation. “The family was expressing that a lot of shareholders—and a lot of family shareholders—were not particularly happy wit
h the direction the company has gone in.”
Whatever happens at Johnson & Johnson, future generations of the Johnson dynasty will continue benefiting from rich trusts and stock holdings. Whether all that unearned wealth will be handled functionally and without scandal was in question.
But Ryan, heading a committee working to preserve the legacy of his octogenarian sculptor uncle J. Seward Johnson Jr., and to “celebrate the accomplishments of the family,” saw a different future for the dynasty.
“There’s a desire to leave a positive mark on the planet rather than the private airplane, the bigger yacht, the collection of bimbos,” he asserts. “There’s less grandiosity.
“I look around at some of my contemporaries and a lot of them are really viewing social consciousness as not being directly related to wealth acquisition. It’s like, well, we have enough, how are we going to leave this place better? The future looks more realistic in terms of the Johnsons being part of the world than in the past.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Early in my research I sent an e-mail to Robert Wood (Woody) Johnson IV describing the parameters of my book, and requesting an interview. About a month later I received an e-mail response from the Johnson dynasty’s de facto patriarch’s public relations person, Jesse Derris, vice president of “crisis communications” at Sunshine, Sachs & Associates.
We arranged to chat by phone, and it quickly became apparent that to Mr. Derris I was a crisis waiting to happen to his billionaire client. Derris ended what began as congenial, introductory small talk by demanding, “who else in the [Johnson] family have you spoken to?”
When I naturally refused to name names, his immediate response was: “To be absolutely clear, there won’t be any interview until I know who you’ve spoken to in the family, and I have a better idea of the other things you’ve gathered, because I’m not going to let him sit down and just field questions from you out of nowhere. That won’t happen.”
Even though I realized from a lifetime of journalism experience with his type that he was just doing what PR people do to earn their keep, I expressed genuine surprise because the New York Jets owner, when he’s around, routinely fields questions from sports reporters with no apparent ground rules.
But Derris pointed out that my request was “a different situation.”
In what way, I asked?
“Because Mr. Johnson, with his interviews, and depending on who else you’ve spoken to from the family—you are going to sell a lot more books, so it’s different … There’s a distinct [monetary] value for you having Mr. Johnson in your book.”
His reasoning was mind-boggling.
I pointed out that my one and only reason for interviewing Mr. Johnson was to be fair, objective, and accurate based on things I had been told about him, and that the idea of making money off his name was, as I stated to Derris, “off the wall.” But it was like trying to prevail on one of those football dummies, the kind players slam into during training camp. Unless I named names, it was clear I was persona non grata in Woody Johnson’s well-guarded camp.
“I know for a fact [an interview with Woody Johnson] won’t happen,” Derris repeated. “I want to know who you spoke to … I want to have a better idea of the types of things you want to talk to him about.”
When I asked Derris to reiterate his requests in an e-mail so I could further consider them, as I still had months of research ahead of me, he responded: “Come on, you think I’m born yesterday? I’m not going to put in writing everything I want to see…”
So that’s where it ended with Woody Johnson’s flack. He was as unbeatable as the New England Patriots were to the Jets.
While no member of the Johnson dynasty had had an active management role in the company since the deaths of Wood Johnson’s grandfather, the General, in 1968, and his father, Bobby, in 1970, the Jets owner and a number of other Johnsons—all big stockholders—wielded considerable influence in the company’s upper echelon in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
That fact was underscored when I requested several historic photos from the Johnson & Johnson archive—of the original three founders and the first company headquarters—and was immediately turned down by Bill Price, vice president of corporate media relations, who told me, “If you’re writing about the family, we won’t give you the photos.” Anything about the dynasty was considered verboten.
Later, as my reporting continued, I discovered that Woody Johnson was telling certain people I had contacted not to talk to me. When I asked Derris in an e-mail about this stonewalling, he denied knowing anything about it.
But it soon became apparent to me that the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune had every reason to try to silence some sources. He had many secrets that he wanted to remain hidden about himself and his family. Few, however, abided by his plea.
In the end, I interviewed scores of people, including a number of Johnson dynasty members, to paint as definitive and accurate a portrait as possible of the generations that became immensely wealthy from the sale of many Band-Aids and cans of baby powder.
For the uninitiated, literary acknowledgments are monotonous, like those endless titles that scroll after a Hollywood epic ends. The only people who actually ever read them, I’m convinced after writing this, my eleventh biography, are the sources who were interviewed, mainly to make sure their names are correctly spelled, and often to see who else in their circle had also cooperated.
The other people who finely comb acknowledgments are those who had asked to remain anonymous, who want to make certain that the author kept the inviolable pledge not to blow their Deep Throat cover. Those very few who asked to remain anonymous in this book did so in order to not injure fragile dynastic relationships, some held together only by a Band-Aid after years of feuding and litigation.
The former, those who spoke on the record, far outnumber the latter. But all gave me their time and energy through hours of interviewing, supplied photos and documentation, and graciously opened doors. I’m indebted to both groups for their honesty, integrity, insight, and candidness.
In alphabetical order by first name, my thanks and gratitude goes out to:
Alan Steinberg, Alex Michelini, Andrea Pernick, Anita Tiburzi Johnson, Arma Andon, Rev. Arthur Rudman, Aubrey Huston, Austin Wand, Barbara Hudson, Barry Peele, Bernard Peyton Watson, Betty Niemeyer Whitley, BettyRay Epstein, Bonnie Tiburzi Faulkner, Brian Sisselman, Charlene Cherry Monahan, Chuck Doubet, Chuck Irwin, Claudia Forman Pleasants, Creighton Hooker, Dale Ryan, Dan Fick, Darby Bannard, David Margolick, Debby Sceli Peacock, Diana Roney, Diane Vonderahe, Don Sico, Dr. Ed Saltzman, Dr. Michael Shepard, Edward Bermingham, Edward Mead Johnson III, Eleanora Walker Tevis, Eric Ryan, Francis Browenstein, Fred Lowell, Garry Randall, Gene Beckwith, Geoffrey Geary, George Cowan, George Rush, Georgeann Gillespie Fox, Gerald Sherrill, Gladys Hudson, Griffin Oakie, Harvey Kitchell, Hendrik Hertzberg, Henry Gardiner, Herb Tobin, Herrick Stickney, Ida Gayden, Irene Bangstrup Theakston, Irving Shepard, Isabella Hutchison, J. Seward Johnson Jr., Joyce Cecilia Johnson, James Childs, James Field Delano, Jaime Fillol, Judge Janet Moschetta, Jasmine Lennard, Jean and Arthur Anshel, John Bigelow Taylor, John Stewart Mills, Neil Vicino, Karen D’arc, Karl Williams, Kathleen Keenan Snow, Kent Muccilli, Laura Freeman Mills, Lawrence Foster, Leslie Caplan, Lew Blatte, Linda Lanceaux Teillon, Linda Vaughn Potter, Lloyd Williams, Lois Caplan Miller, Louis Meader, Lucinda Ziesing, Margaret Oppliger Boyd, Margie Lazarus, Marianne Strong, Marilyn Raiffe Leach, Mark Smith, Martin Muncy, Mary Frey Hickman, Mary Miller, Michael Richard Spielvogel, Mike Cooper, Miles B. Neustein, Nancy Brownstein, Nancy Frank Hauserman, Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad, Nancy White, Neil Vicino, Nicholas Gouverneur Rutgers IV, Pat Lynch, Patricia Johnson, Patricia Potter, Patrick McCarthy, Paul Tobin, Peter Gillespie, Peter Holbrook, Peter Lambert, Phil Calihan, Philip Hagenah, Philip Lanier Ross, Quaint Doelger, Quentin Ryan, Racey Cohen, Ralph Hart, Rebecca Himeles Smith, Rhody Eisenstein, Rich Randall, Richard Q. Praeger Jr., Rod Mandelstam, Roger Ricco
, Ron Artinian, Sadja (Johnson) Greenwood, Sarah Strong Drake, Sherwin Harris, Sofia Pappatheodorou, Sonya Maria Noel Stokowsky Thorbeck, Stan Shanbron, Stanley Engle, Stephen Cutler Gidley, Steve Fishman, Steve Kroll, Steve Rempe, Steve Tobin, Sue Ellen Firestone Sherman, Sue Goodman, Suellen Epstein, Susan Matlof Harris, Suzie Goldstein Epstein, Sven Ginman, Thomas Doelger, Tila Tequila, Tom Proctor, Tom Wilson, Walter Lovejoy, William Culver White, William Jessup. There are others whose names and appreciation you know.
AUTHOR’S NOTE ON SOURCES
While the business news media reports extensively on the financial affairs, consumer issues and personnel changes involving Johnson & Johnson, the family behind the popular brands—from the founders in the later nineteenth century to the contemporary family members of the twenty-first century—have received far less attention, except when some are involved in court cases and scandals that ignite headlines.
As a result, my goal to research and write as thorough and complete an independent biography as possible of the Johnson dynasty involved tracking down credible and knowledgeable relatives, friends, and close associates.
Of aid in my early research—along with hundreds of newspaper clippings and magazine articles—were three books, the first published in the late 1980s, the second in the early 1990s, and the third in the late 1990s. The first two—Johnson v. Johnson by Barbara Goldsmith and Undue Influence by David Margolick—focused on a highly publicized court battle over an immense fortune that underscored some Johnson family members’ litigiousness and desire for more unearned wealth. A fascinating, previously unreported sidelight to that case—the battle involving those two books—is detailed in this volume.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 45