Warsaw, (Poland): She was a Polish farmer’s daughter who emigrated to the United States, a maid who worked for a wealthy American heir, 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 went on to become an avid art collector, owning works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Gauguin and Raphael.
Her family announced her death on Thursday in the Polish daily Rzeczpospol-ita, saying she died on Monday “after a long and serious illness.” It didn’t give any further details about her illness or where she died but said she will be buried April 15 in Wroclaw, the southwestern Polish city where she spent much of her youth.
Barbara Piasecka, who went by the diminutive “Basia,” was born in 1937 in an area of prewar eastern Poland that now lies in Belarus. Her family resettled after the war in Wroclaw, where she obtai-ned a degree in art history.
She left communist Poland, studying for a time in Rome before arriving in 1968 in the US?with $100 and no knowledge of English. She worked 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.
In 1971, he divorced his second wife, the mother of two of his children, and married Piasecka eight days later. At the time he was 76 and she was 34.
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Heir to Johnson & Johnson fortune passes away at 76
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