Johnson v. Johnson [antikvár]

''For him there were no rules,'' J, Seward Johnson, the eighty-seven-year-old heir to the Johnson Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, signed his last will on April 14, 1983, leaned back in his wheelchair, and remarked, "This solves a lot of problems." He died thirty-nine days later, leaving virtually his entire $500 million estate to his third wife, Barbara (called Basia, and pronounced Basha) Piasecka Johnson, a woman whom he had met fifteen years previously, when she was employed as a cook/chambermaid by his second wife. Basia had arrived from Poland in 1968, with $100 to her name, a degree in art history, and a smattering of English. Within fifteen months she was living in a luxurious Sutton Place apartment paid for by Johnson and serving her benefactor as a 12,000-a-year "art curator" and occasional scuba-diving companion. They were married November 11, 1971, eight days after his divorce. She was thirty-four, he was seventy-six. According to Alexander Forger of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley McCloy, who represented the six Johnson children (ranging in age from forty-one to sixty) as objectants to Seward Johnson's will, Basia "relied on her ability to