Heir to Johnson & Johnson fortune dies at 76
Barbara Piasecka Johnson, art collector and heir to Johnson & Johnson fortune, dies at 76
By Vanessa Gera, Associated Press | Associated Press
She was a
Polish farmer's daughter who emigrated to the United States, a maid who
worked for a wealthy American heir, and a third wife who inherited much
of the Johnson & Johnson fortune after a sensational court battle with her six stepchildren.
Barbara Piasecka Johnson, the widow of J. Seward Johnson Sr., heir to millions made from bandages, baby oil and pharmaceutical products, has died at age 76.
Johnson was best known for a nasty legal battle after her husband's
1983 death, a feud that pitted her against his six children from two
previous marriages. She largely prevailed, emerging with about $300
million from a fortune worth more than $500 million.
A resident of Monaco and one of the world's richest women, Johnson
used her wealth to become an art collector, amassing works by Rembrandt,
Rubens, Gauguin and Raphael.
Her family announced her death
Thursday in the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita, saying she died "after a
long and serious illness" and that she will be buried April 15 in Wroclaw, the southwestern Polish city where she spent much of her youth.
Johnson died in Wroclaw, said Ricky Stachowicz,
general counsel for BPJ Holding Corp., Johnson's Princeton, New
Jersey-based private real-estate holding company. The cause of death was
not being disclosed at the request of her family, Stachowicz said.
Barbara Piasecka, who went by the diminutive "Basia," was born in
1937 in Staniewicze, in an area of prewar eastern Poland that now lies
in Belarus. Her family resettled after the war in Wroclaw, where she
obtained a degree in art history.
She left communist Poland, studying for a time in Rome before
arriving in 1968 in the United States with $100 and no knowledge of
English. She got a job working as a cook and a maid in the Oldwick, New
Jersey, estate of the Johnson & Johnson heir and his second wife of
more than 30 years.
A year later, she left the family to take art courses at New York University, and Johnson Sr. rented an apartment for her in Manhattan and moved in with her.
In 1971, he divorced his second wife, the mother of two of his
children, and married Piasecka eight days later. None of his children
attended the wedding. At the time he was 76 and she was 34.
Johnson Sr., son of the founder of Johnson & Johnson, bequeathed most of his fortune
of more than $500 million to Piasecka, largely excluding from his will
both his children and Harbor Branch, an oceanographic research institute
in Florida that he had founded.
The children contested the will, saying they did it on principle.
They depicted their stepmother as a gold-digger who used fraud, threats
and abuse to coerce her ailing 87-year-old husband into signing a new
version of the will and said he was not of sound mind when he did so.
He signed it six weeks before he died of prostate cancer after having
changed it many times in the preceding years, each time giving more and
more of his estate to his third wife.
Johnson disputed the portrayal made by her husband's children. She
said her late husband chose to leave them out of his will because he had
given them trust funds years earlier. She also argued that he didn't
want to leave them more money because he was disappointed by what she
called their greed and "scandalous behavior."
A settlement was reached in 1986 under which she kept more than $300
million, with the remaining going to Johnson Sr.'s children, the
oceanographic institute, taxes and legal fees.
Johnson was not known in her homeland until the fall of communism in
1989, when she stepped in and offered millions of dollars to save the
bankruptcy-threatened shipyard in Gdansk that had been the center of
Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa's pro-democracy Solidarity
movement.
On one occasion she was given an enthusiastic welcome by workers at
the massive shipyard, even though her plan to save it fell through.
A biography provided by her lawyer focused primarily on Johnson's
philanthropic and art-related activities. It noted that her paintings
are loaned to museums worldwide and that she set up the Barbara Piasecka
Johnson Foundation in 1974 to help the sick and needy, including people
with autism.
It said she donated her large art collection to her foundation to sell, and that proceeds went to help people with autism.
A funeral Mass is planned for
April 15 in the Wroclaw cathedral, after which Johnson will be buried at
a cemetery in the city, according to her death notice.
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