Word: sewards
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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 Bülow 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...
...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...
...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...
...Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu...