Law: Life-Styles of the Rich and Famous

First Johnson & Johnson, now Johnson vs. Johnson

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 to be the...

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