The Family Company
Casey Johnson is the first real face I’ve had to the family, and I’ve seen much more than her face now that news agencies are airing her engagement video to Tila Tequila (politely referred to as “Ms. Tequila”) in which the two prance around in their underwear, intoxicated on a little more than love.
Casey Johnson, heiress of the baby shampoo and band-aid empire Johnson & Johnson, was found dead January 4th, 2010, bringing the privileged, if less-than-private, merry-go-round of her life to a jerking halt. Even as the morbid chorus of the media sings her elegy, the cause and even the date of her death remain uncertain; the last testament to her final hours on earth is a December 29th post to Twitter (“Sweet dreams everyone, I’m getting a new car”). Internet gossip mongers, ceaselessly clamoring for the tiniest and most morbid details from the safety of their bedrooms, speculate that “she could have been dead for days” before a maid found her folded in deathly repose in her Beverly Hills home.
The name “Casey Johnson” meant nothing to me as it clambered its way up the bloody ladder of the week’s headlines; that particularly spongy portion of my brain reserved for cataloging the deaths of pop cultural icons was soaked to saturation with CNN.com’s December tribute to Alaina Reed-Amini, who is best remembered for having left the cast of Sesame Street more than 20 years prior. Eventually, however, the words ‘dead heiress’ refused to be ignored any longer.
Articles about Johnson’s death read like the VIP list of hard-partying L.A. nightclubs (Please never let me be upstaged by Paris Hilton in my own obituary), and while the ever-quotable lines of Twitter accounts could depressingly suffice in the place of today’s journalism, news sources should feel free to omit the 140-character condolences of Lindsay Lohan’s ex-girlfriend, no matter how genuine her tweeted-up tears seem to be. Johnson grew up on the pre-Gossip Girl Upper East Side, slumber partying with the Hiltons and other mini-millionaires. In death, she is covered in the same sheen of quasi-fame as she was in life: She penned a book at fourteen about living with juvenile diabetes, an act upstaged in the public consciousness by a near-nude Vanity Fair photo shoot and a public declaration that her boyfriend had been swiped in by the claws of her much senior aunt.
In the last years of her life, she adopted a toddler from Kazakhstan (naming her after a similarly ill-fated celebrity, Marilyn Monroe), announced her bisexuality, had her hair lit on fire by an ex-girlfriend (so much for no-tears haircare), was charged with grand theft for stealing $20,000 in underwear (used) among other items, and got engaged to reality TV star Tila Tequila less than a month before being found dead in a reportedly rat-infested home on the verge of repossession. All this from the baby shampoo heiress?
Clearly, I’ve brushed up on my Casey Johnson trivia, and not merely for the car-wreck quality that mesmerized me, but because, in a twisted series of events, the two of our lives were separated by only two degrees, and in the middle was a stack of court papers.
I am the heiress of a failed ophthalmology practice in Portland, Oregon. In the early 90s, my father, in the midst of a manic high, proposed to Johnson & Johnson a new surgery center that was to be built outside city limits. The details – not unlike those surrounding Casey’s death – were hazy. The request was a mix of philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and an improperly-medicated bipolar disorder. Johnson & Johnson replied with a check for $1,000,000. A loan, as they thought it at the time.
To this day, my father’s financial dealings remain somewhat obscured, partially by those bits of his brain matter which were lost to electric shock therapy. At the height of his fuzzy-accounting escapades, we had an Olympic-sized pool in the backyard with a water slide and my mother tooled around town in a baby-blue Jaguar. With an extra million lying around, Rolls Royces started appearing and then, one day, even a boat. As a five year-old, this was all very exciting.
Among all the cars and the pool with the slide and the boat, though, there was an empty space: the place where the surgery center. Johnson & Johnson was starting to notice. So, in earnest, my father sat down and penned them an explanatory letter. Building surgery centers was hard work, time consuming work, expensive work. He would need more money to finish (or start) the project. Johnson & Johnson sent a check: another $1,000,000.
The downfall of his ill-gotten empire came soon after the second million, with money flying out the door on expenditures that no accountant could keep up with. At one point, we owned a Starbucks. Soon the state medical board came knocking with reports of insurance fraud, and creditors put our number on speed dial. It had been fun while it lasted, but in the end, I was asking my elementary school teacher how to spell ‘bankruptcy’ for the Mother’s Day card I was making. Chapter 7 was filed; the assets were seized; the money was gone.
The worst part of bankruptcy is the guilt—not that my father felt any. He lost his medical license twice, had a brief career selling burial plots, divorced my mother, and now collects social security and lies about his age to get the senior discount at the diner where he eats his meals. My mother, however, even after watching her mink coats get carted away by the repo-man, and even after giving up the keys of her Jaguar for a 1987 Buick station wagon with fake wood paneling, felt nothing but tremendous guilt for all the money that would never be repaid to all the people who had so trustingly signed it over to my father’s unbalanced brain chemistry. Johnson & Johnson and their two million dollar imaginary surgery center topped her guilt list.
For the last 15 years, wheeling the cart through the grocery store with my mother and a handful of coupons for “10 for 10” boxes of macaroni, there has been the awkward pause in front of the band-aids. Off-brand “adhesive bandages” make the same antibiotic promises as their name-brand peers for half the price, and my mother’s hand always reaches out in hesitation. Then, with resolve, she drops the Johnson & Johnson band-aids in the cart and wheels away. For 15 years, she has been repaying them $4.59 at a time in small pharmaceutical purchases.
The Johnson family has long existed in my mind as the squeaky clean American dynasty that cares about making babies’ bath time tear-free. Casey Johnson is the first real face I’ve had to the family, and I’ve seen much more than her face now that news agencies are airing her engagement video to Tila Tequila (politely referred to as “Ms. Tequila”) in which the two prance around in their underwear, intoxicated on a little more than love.
I always imagined the Johnsons having everything I didn’t. For a brief moment, at 5 years old, I had had a glimpse of their lifestyle as we spent their money with the reckless abandon fitting of the Johnson family’s actual peers. The moment created in me a confusing mixture of jealousy and guilt toward the Johnson family, a feeling called up for the rest of my life with every incessant smiling baby in a bath commercial on television. When Woody Johnson, Casey’s father, bought the New York Jets for $635,000,000 in 2000, it was clear that my father had in no way dented the family’s fortunes; my guilt eased somewhat, my mother may have even started purchasing off-brand band-aids.
Now, seeing Casey Johnson’s death splashed across every tabloid, the jealousy is beginning to subside.
