The third book that was of immense help was a self-published biography, Robert Wood Johnson, The Gentleman Rebel, written by Lawrence G. Foster, who had retired as Johnson & Johnson’s corporate vice president of public relations. While focusing mainly on the life and leadership of “the General,” Foster’s book also offered an extensive history of the company’s founders based on his insider corporate access, along with interviews he had conducted years ago with a number of now deceased family members and associates.
Accessing some of his reportage, which I credit where due in these pages, and with my own independent interviews, a number of which were conducted with sprightly octogenarian members of the Johnson dynasty who had direct knowledge of the early days, I was able to paint a portrait of the Johnson forebears and early corporate history as part of the wider story I tell.
Much of my account of the Johnson dynasty, however, deals with more contemporary members, such as Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV. With that in mind I would like to point out that all source quotes—people interviewed by me—are usually written in the present tense (“he says,” “she observes.”) Material quotes gathered from published accounts are usually written in the past tense (“he said,” “she observed.”) As much as possible without interfering with the flow of the narrative, I identified the source for those quotes, or accounts (for example, The New York Times), and the date, or time frame, and/or author. Refer to my acknowledgments for those interviewed by me, and see my selected bibliography for books used in my research, or from which I quoted. I also quote from correspondence shared with me that is attributed where mentioned.
Included among the publications referred to as part of my research and mostly attributed in these pages include, but are not limited to: The New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Observer, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Princeton Packet, Princeton Town Topics, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, Time, Fortune, People, Newsweek, Reuters, Associated Press, New York magazine, Town & Country, and a number of Web sites that are identified in the referenced material of this volume.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Michael Patrick. The Founding Fortunes. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987.
Bainbridge, John. Garbo. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955.
Chasins, Abram. Leopold Stokowski. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1979.
Daniel, Oliver. Stokowski, A Counterpoint of View. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1982.
Darrid, Diana Douglas. In the Wings. New York: Barricade Books, 1999.
Douglas, Kirk. The Ragman’s Son. New York: Pocket Books, 1989.
Foster, Laurence G. A Company That Cares, One-Hundred-Year Illustrated History of Johnson & Johnson. New Brunswick, NJ, 1986.
Foster, Laurence G. Robert Wood Johnson, The Gentleman Rebel. State College, PA: Lillian Press, 1999.
Goldsmith, Barbara. Johnson v. Johnson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
Greenfield, Robert. Timothy Leary. New York: Harcourt, 2006.
Hoffman, Philip B. General Johnson Said. North Brunswick, NJ: Leury, Marks & Strasser, 1971.
Johnson, Robert Wood IV, Sale Johnson, Casey Johnson, and Susan Kleinman. Managing Your Child’s Diabetes. New York: MasterMedia Limited, 1992, 1994.
Kelley, Kitty. Oprah, A Biography. New York: Crown, 2010.
Kolva, Jeanne, and Joanne Pisciotta, for the Highland Park Historical Society. Highland Park, Borough of Homes. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005.
Margolick, David. Undue Influence, The Epic Battle for the Johnson & Johnson Fortune. New York: William Morrow, 1993.
Miller, Mary E. Baroness of Hobcaw, The Life of Belle W. Baruch. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.
Nielsen, Waldemar A. The Big Foundations. New York: Columbia University Press, The Twentieth Century Fund, 1972.
Nielsen, Waldemar A. The Golden Donors, A New Anatomy of the Great Foundations. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1985.
Paris, Barry. Garbo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Ryan, Rex with Don Yaeger. Play Like You Mean It, Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World’s Most Beautiful Game. New York: Doubleday, 2011.
Schleicher, William A., and Susan J. Winter. In the Somerset Hills, the Landed Gentry. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1997.
Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
Tequila, Tila. Hooking Up with Tila Tequila, A Guide to Love, Fame, Happiness, Success, and Being the Life of the Party. New York: Scribner, 2008.
Tiburzi, Bonnie, and Valerie Moolman. Takeoff! The Story of America’s First Woman Pilot for a Major Airline. New York: Crown, 1973.
Vanderbilt, Gloria. Gloria Vanderbilt, It Seemed Important at the Time. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Wedeking, Susan, editor. A Century of Caring, Celebrating the First 100 Years of Mead Johnson & Company. Mead Johnson & Company, 2005.
Evangeline Brewster Johnson, sister of Johnson & Johnson’s chauvinistic leaders—Robert Wood Johnson Jr., known as the “General,” and playboy J. Seward Johnson Sr.—was cheated out of prime company stock and power. She had two daughters in the first of her three marriages, the last to a homosexual, and was herself considered bisexual. (Sadja Greenwood)
Belle Baruch (left), lesbian daughter of Wall Street titan Bernard Baruch, fell in love with Evangeline Brewster Johnson, and the pair was inseparable until Evangeline’s first turbulent marriage to famed maestro and roué Leopold Stokowski. Here, the two young women flirt and play at the Baruch estate. (The Belle W. Baruch Foundation, Hobcaw Barony)
Evangeline Brewster Johnson with her third husband, the gay one-time hairdresser and artist Charles Merrill, her junior by several decades. Her last years were spent in Gray Gardens–style hell before her death at 93 in 1990. Merrill later tried to auction their bizarre love story as a screenplay on eBay. (Sadja Greenwood)
Troubled heiress Mary Lea Johnson Ryan D’Arc Richards, the first baby face on the Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder can, with her third husband, the gay showbiz maven Marty Richards, who played a controversial role in dynasty dramas and was detested by certain family members. After the death of her father, Seward Johnson Sr., she claimed he molested her, which was later questioned. (© Globe Photos/ZUMAPRESS.com)
After a troubled childhood and a horrific and scandalous first marriage that included a failed suicide attempt and a shootout, Seward Johnson Jr. (far right) became a prominent sculptor. Pictured here at the Corcoran Gallery, his exhibit (left) was lambasted by the Washington Post art critic. Johnson also spent years questioning the paternity of a daughter. (© The Washington Times)
Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV, billionaire owner of the New York Jets, and great-grandson of one of the Johnson & Johnson founders, was mostly a bench warmer as backup tight end when he played for Millbrook School, pictured here, number 81, to the left of roommate Jack Mills. Woody joined Animal House–style frats while in college, and nearly died in a drunken fall.
Young Keith Wold Johnson, one of Woody’s four siblings, became troubled in his teens and began using drugs, including LSD, and once was arrested for possessing marijuana. Thought to be gay, he died in his mid-twenties of a cocaine overdose, leaving behind an immense fortune to his three brothers and sister.
After graduating from college, Woody Johnson (center, background) took his father’s advice and teamed up with “a Jew who wasn’t a silver spoon”—Michael Spielvogel (foreground)—to learn “bidness” and develop condos and land in South Florida, a partnership that ended badly. Here, they pitch a Fort Lauderdale high-rise.
Nancy Sale Frey, a jock from a prominent Jewish family in St. Louis, elected herself captain of the newly formed women’s tennis team at her alma mater, the University of Miami. She met her future husband, Woody Johnson, working for a company marketing one of his Florida condo developments in the 1970s.
In June 1978, on the grounds of his parents’ estate in Princeton, New J
ersey, Woody Johnson, 31, married Nancy Sale Frey, 29, in a very private ceremony—after she converted from Judaism and after signing a prenuptial agreement. She would give birth to his three daughters during a sometimes turbulent union.
On September 24, 1979, at a hospital in Hollywood, Florida, Woody Johnson became a father when wife, Sale, gave birth to cute, chubby heiress, Sale Trotter Case Johnson, known as Casey. At eight she would be diagnosed with life-threatening diabetes, and later in life diagnosed with the mental illness Borderline Personality Disorder, which seriously impacted her behavior.
When she was about four, Casey Johnson was hamming it up with a child’s exuberance. Years later that wildness would turn into scandalous gossip column fodder when she became a Hollywood vixen, embarrassing her family, especially her father, who essentially washed his hands of her.
Before Woody Johnson and troubled daughter Casey went to war, stopping all communication because of her scandalous behavior and failure to seek proper help, the two cheerfully posed together at a glitzy event in New York City. (©PatrickMcMullan.com)
In happier family times, circa 1990, Woody and Sale Johnson and their brood posed for artist Geoffrey Geary for this 41-by-50-inch oil on canvas, entitled Johnson Family at the Farm. It depicts Casey, a horse named Christmas, and sisters Jaime and Daisy with their parents and family dog, Butter. Their elegant New Jersey farm had every luxury amenity. (“Portrait of Robert Wood Johnson IV and family, painted by Geoffrey Geary, Johnson Family at the Farm”)
In 2006, Casey Johnson gave a tell-all to Vanity Fair entitled “Heiress vs. Heiress,” about her aunt—her father’s sister—Elizabeth Ross “Libet” Johnson (far left) that infuriated the dynasty. Casey’s mother, Sale (center), advised her daughter against cooperating, but she didn’t listen. (©PatrickMcMullan.com)
In the mid-1990s, the five-times-married mother of four Libet Johnson commissioned the society portraitist James Childs to paint her lying seductively on a chaise, part of a set she had built in his studio. The frame alone cost her a cool $60,000. She didn’t like the way he painted her nose, so he changed it. But he refused her request to pose in a negligée. (James Childs, “Portrait of Eliza beth Ross Johnson,” oil on canvas 21½ x 29¾, 1998)
In 2007, against the advice of family and friends who felt she wasn’t emotionally and physically fit to be a mother, Casey Johnson adopted a baby girl from Kazakhstan, who she named Ava-Monroe Johnson after her movie star idols. She showed off her latest acquisition at a luncheon for a new book by actress Joan Collins. (NPX/starmaxine.com 2008)
In the weeks before Casey Johnson tragically died at age 30 in January 2010, her life, spinning out of control, included a bizarre relationship with the TV reality show celebrity Tila Tequila, who claimed the two were planning to be married and that Casey, who she called her “wifey,” had given her a ring. But family members say Casey wasn’t gay. (© Hellmuth Dominguez, PacificCoastNews.com)
After Casey Johnson died from diabetes-related issues, her mother, Sale, and second husband, former football player Ahmad Rashad, both in their sixties, took on the responsibility of raising adopted Ava-Monroe, and thought she was “the most beguiling creature.” But, in early 2013, Sale and Rashad appeared headed for a divorce. (©PatrickMcMullan.com)
Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad’s divorce from Woody Johnson was finalized in November 2001, and her stockbroker father joyfully boasted that his daughter received a whopping $100 million settlement. (© Globe Photos/ZUMApress.com)
After Woody’s divorce from Sale, he dated a number of women before becoming romantically involved with pretty Suzanne Ircha, two decades his junior. She gave birth to two Johnson heirs—Robert Wood Johnson V, and another son called Brick—before she and Woody were wed in June 2009. (John Barret–Globe Photos, Inc. 2010)
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Note: RWJ stands for Robert Wood Johnson (I, II, III, IV, and V). J&J means Johnson & Johnson company. Women are usually listed under their maiden names, with cross-references from married names.
Abdominal Binder
abortion clinics
abortions
Abscam sting operation
Adams, Cindy
Adams, Mary Anne
ad campaigns
A. G. Edwards & Sons
AIDS
research
Akselrad, Ira
Albert, Marv
alcohol
Allstate Construction College
American Ferment
American Folk Art Museum
American Medical Association
American National Red Cross Society
American Video
Andon, Arma
Anthony, Robert
Armstrong, Edwin and Martha
Armstrong, Evangeline
(1892) marries Robert Wood Johnson
(1916) marries John W. Dennis
(1918) death
moves to New York
Aronson, Sy
Articular Surface Replacement (ARS)
artificial hips
Arts Council of Princeton
Atlantic Health Jet Training Center, Florham Park, N.J.
Ava-Monroe (adopted by Casey)
Ayers-Allen, Phylicia
AZT
babies, J&J products for
Babson, Roger
Babson Institute
Baby Powder can
Bachelors (club)
Bailey, F. Lee
Balthazar restaurant, New York
Band-Aid
invention of
Bannard, Billy
Bannard, Mya
Bannard, Walter Darby
artistic career
and Jeniah Johnson paternity
Barlow, George H.
Barrow Neurological Institute of St. John’s Hospital and Medical Center
Barton, Clara
Baruch, Belle
Baruch, Bernard
baseball, organized
Bears Club golf course, Jupiter, Florida
Beaton, Cecil
Bedminster Township, New Jersey
Belichick, Bill
Belleview mansion
Belushi, John
Bermuda
Betty and Isabel (maids)
Betty Ford Center
Beverly Hills, Calif.
birthing, J&J products for
Bissoon, Lionel
Blount, Harvey D.
Blue Hill Inn, Maine
Bolkiah, Prince Jefri
Bolshoi Ballet
Bolton, Michael
borderline personality disorder (BPD)
Border Patrol
Boston University
Brett, Shawn P.
Brinkley, David
Brothers Three (club)
Brownstein, Francis
Brown University
Bruff, James “Jimmy” Lewis
Brutsch, Sheila Johnson. See Johnson, Sheila
Buckley, William F. Jr.
Burke, James E.
Burmeister, Neil J.
Bush, George W.
Bushnell, Betty May Wold Johnson Gillespie. See Wold, Betty May
Bushnell, Douglas Fountain
(1978) marries Betty Wold
(2007) death
cable television, Keith J’s investment in
Calihan, Phil
Cambodia, Elizabeth Johnson’s philanthropy in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
campaign contributions, limits on
Canterbury School, New Milford, Conn.
capital gains, tax avoidance on
Caputo, Bruce Faulkner
Cardin, Pierre
Caroid
Carter, Jimmy
Catholicism
Center for Responsive Politics
Childs, James
Christ Church, New Brunswick, N.J.
Christie, Chris
Christopher medal from Pius XII to RWJ II
Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation
Cleveland, Grover
Cliffside Malibu clinic
Clinton, Bill and Hillary and Chelsea
Cloud Walk Farm
Coca-Cola
cocaine
cod liver oil
coeds, proved virgins
Cohen, Neil
Colao, Tony
Collier, Richard
A Company That Cares (book)
Conford, Milton B.
Conscience Point Inn, Hamptons
convalescence, J&J products for
Coral Ridge Country Club, Fort Lauderdale
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
cotton, J&J
Council on Foreign Relations
Cowan, George Nathan Jr.
Cowan, Richard (“George Malden”)
Craik, Douglas Elliott
Crockett, Philip D.
Cronin, Jimmy
crystal meth
Culverhouse, Hugh Franklin
Cuomo, Christopher “Chris”
Cutler, Ellen
Daily News (New York)
Dalton, Helen
D’Arc, Karen Scourby
D’Arc, Mary Lea Johnson Ryan. See Johnson, Mary Lea
D’Arc, Victor
(1995) death
Davies, Sara Tiedeman
Davis, Gregg
Davis, Peter
Deadspin Web site
Dee, John
De Lamar, Alice
De Lamar, Joseph
Delano, James Field “Jeff”
Delta Chi
Deneuve, Catherine
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 46