Life-Styles of the Rich and Famous

By Richard Lacayo

When he died in 1983 at the age of 87, J. Seward Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson health-care fortune, left an estate of perhaps $500 million. By the terms of his last will, nearly all of it went to his much younger third wife Barbara, a Polish immigrant who was once the family chambermaid. And thereby hangs a legal squabble currently featuring the unkindest courtroom disclosures this side of the Von Buelow case. Johnson's six children by previous marriages were virtually all cut from the will. They tar their stepmother as a scheming shrew who came to be the housekeeper and stayed to clean house with a vengeance. She blasts them as decadent offspring making a last-ditch lunge at the old man's checkbook. Is this what is meant by an embarrassment of riches?

Now unfolding in a New York City courtroom, the case has already generated paper on a scale more typical of an antitrust battle. Not even writers of Dynasty could have dished such a saucy stew. In the courtroom, the children pointedly ignore Barbara Johnson, 49, who each day sits just a few feet from them, looking serene and expensively groomed--a far cry from the Polish art-history graduate who arrived in the U.S. in 1968 with just $100 and a few words of English. She went to work as a maid for Johnson and his second wife, and three years later married him a week after his divorce. During their twelve-year marriage the pair embarked upon a style of high living to which even he had been previously unaccustomed. Together they created a $30 million, 140-acre homestead in Princeton, N.J., called Jasna Polana after Leo Tolstoy's Russian estate, though what Tolstoy would have thought of its air-conditioned doghouse is hard to say. Even before the bequest that may make her one of the world's wealthiest women, she cut a swath through auction houses, and recently spent a staggering $4.8 million for a drawing by Raphael and $1.5 million for a Louis XVI cabinet.

The Johnson children charge that their stepmother "bullied and terrorized" their father, once even slapping his face. She turned his Florida estate into a gilded isolation booth, they complain, replacing the English-speaking help with Poles. They further maintain that she plotted to siphon off his wealth with the help of her friend Nina Zagat, a Yale Law graduate and Wall Street attorney who drew up the last sequence of wills. As co-executor and trustee of the estate, she stands to make as much as $10 million in commissions and fees. In the contested will, five of Johnson's children were left nothing. The eldest son got a token million and a summer house on Cape Cod, Mass.

For her part, Barbara Johnson maintains that those provisions fully reflected Johnson Sr.'s oft-expressed intentions. She notes that in 1944 he established trust funds for his children that, if left untouched, would be valued at $110 million each. Despite nibbling at the principal, even the poorest of the Johnson offspring is still worth at least $23 million. The elder Johnson had informed them in a long succession of previous wills that he would not leave them anything more. One reason, says Barbara, is that the old man was offended by their penchant for scandal. For example, there was J. Seward Jr.'s messy 1965 divorce, before which his wife had shot a private detective sent to monitor her extramarital trysts, not to mention the mishaps of Daughter Mary Lea, who once charged that her second husband had a homosexual affair with their chauffeur and plotted her murder. Then there were publicized allegations about a grandson injecting the family dog with heroin, and his brother planning to blow up a police station.

During the first days of the trial, Attorney-Executor Zagat testified that Johnson was of sound mind even when he signed the last of the wills, just 39 days before his death. From the time of his marriage in 1971, when he was 76 and his bride was 34, Johnson made 22 wills or major modifications that gave his wife ever greater shares of his estate. His final will was the fourth drafted in eight weeks. By then, say the children, their father was weakened, senile and fully in his wife's clutches. J. Seward Jr., 55, a sculptor of lifelike bronzes, told the New York Times: "We could not allow words to be put in his mouth that way."

Presiding over this to-hell-with-you hullabaloo is Judge Marie Lambert, a seasoned New York City politician who runs her surrogate's courtroom with a singular feistiness. "Will someone turn the lights on back there?" she hollered one morning last week after taking the bench. "This place looks like a funeral parlor." A joke about funeral parlors during the biggest inheritance case in state history? It may be that for Lambert, a self-proclaimed defender of widows and orphans, this case arraying one against the other is a test of her emotional fortitude. She had frequent run-ins last week with attorneys for the widow, and during a legal huddle before the bench, she characterized the courtroom technique of one as "Amateur time!" in a voice that could be heard across the room.

For all the squabbling, neither Barbara Johnson nor the children are likely to be called to the stand. Some observers wonder what the children have to gain in their challenge, since dozens of the preceding wills also slighted them. They claim their fight will benefit their father's philanthropic interests, which were dramatically undercut only in the last will. But the speculation is that they really expect a settlement offer to forestall years of legal delays. Meanwhile, Judge Lambert has asked for the jury's patience as they examine this complex test of wills, in which "we are all working hard." Shoveling dirt can be hard work indeed, and it is expected to take more than two months in her courtroom alone to get to the bottom of it all. --By Richard Lacayo. Reported by Raji Samghabadi/New York

With reporting by Raji Samghabadi/New York