Law: Life-Styles of the Rich and Famous

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 housekeeper and stayed to clean house with a vengeance. She blasts them as decadent offspring making a last-ditch lunge at the old man's checkbook. Is this what is meant by an embarrassment of riches?

Now unfolding in a New York City courtroom, the case has already generated paper on a scale more typical of an antitrust battle. Not even writers of Dynasty could have dished such a saucy stew. In the courtroom, the children pointedly ignore Barbara Johnson, 49, who each day sits just a few feet from them, looking serene and expensively groomed--a far cry from the Polish art-history graduate who arrived in the U.S. in 1968 with just $100 and a few words of English. She went to work as a maid for Johnson and his second wife, and three years later married him a week after his divorce. During their twelve-year marriage the pair embarked upon a style of high living to which even he had been previously unaccustomed. Together they created a $30 million, 140-acre homestead in Princeton, N.J., called Jasna Polana after Leo Tolstoy's Russian estate, though what Tolstoy would have thought of its air-conditioned doghouse is hard to say. Even before the bequest that may make her one of the world's wealthiest women, she cut a swath through auction houses, and recently spent a staggering $4.8 million for a drawing by Raphael and $1.5 million for a Louis XVI cabinet.

The Johnson children charge that their stepmother "bullied and terrorized" their father, once even slapping his face. She turned his Florida estate into a gilded isolation booth, they complain, replacing the English-speaking help with Poles. They further maintain that she plotted to siphon off his wealth with the help of her friend Nina Zagat, a Yale Law graduate and Wall Street attorney who drew up the last sequence of wills. As co-executor and trustee of the estate, she stands to make as much as $10 million in commissions and fees. In the contested will, five of Johnson's children were left nothing. The eldest son got a token million and a summer house on Cape Cod, Mass.