With the extraordinary investigative acumen and sensitive narrative skills that informed her best-selling Little Gloria... Happy at Last, Barbara Goldsmith now gives us the most sensational case of a contested will in American history - weaving a hypnotic tale of vast wealth and moral corruption.
When J. Seward Johnson, the pharmaceutical heir, died in 1983 at the age of 87, his six children (each of whom was already in possession of an immense fortune) were outraged to learn that he had willed his entire $500-million estate to their stepmother Basia - a woman 42 years Seward's junior, a Polish refugee who had once worked as a chambermaid in his household. They came to believe that Basia had used undue influence to "enchant" their father, prying his fortune away from him and turning him against his own children. They wanted "justice." The legal battle that followed spawned a seventeen-week-long trial, the involvement of 210 lawyers (some of whose behavior was legally and ethically questionable), $24 million in legal fees, and public disclosures of the often scandalous details of the lives of many of the parties involved, including attempted suicide, drug addiction, and accusations of a murder plot.
Going beyond the courtroom itself, Goldsmith delves into the family's past and present, demonstrating that, from the start, the poisonous effects of overwhelming wealth were a tacit but powerfully felt subtext to the proceedings. From her insider's position, she reveals the true Johnson legacy - one of profound emotional damage. In their own voices Seward's children, his first wife, relatives, friends, employees, and Basia herself express their thoughts and feelings with a startling degree of frankness, revealing a past of incest, malignant neglect, and betrayal. Through this deepening of the story, Goldsmith has been able to elucidate the profoundly complex reasons why each of the Johnsons believed that what was most emphatically at sta...