Who is Johnson and Johnson owned by?

JOHNSON & JOHNSON calls itself a family of companies. Business aside, Johnson & Johnson's colorful founding family has made a lasting mark on New Jersey.

Founded in 1886 by three brothers -- Robert Wood Johnson, James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson -- the company remained fully under family control until 1944, when it began to sell shares to the public.

Family members continued to rule the executive suite until 1963, when Robert Wood Johnson Jr., the son of the founder, retired as chief executive at age 70.

Quirky and outspoken, Robert Wood Johnson Jr. detested bureaucracy. He became known as General Johnson after serving during World War II as chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, an agency created to help small businesses as larger ones captured huge government contracts.

After a year of being a champion for small companies -- something that irritated his colleagues in big business -- the general returned to Johnson & Johnson with the complaint that "Washington is a magnet for mediocrity."

When he died in 1968, Robert Wood Johnson Jr. left $1.2 billion to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation -- New Jersey's largest charity and the fifth largest in the United States -- whose mission is to improve health care in America.

The general's son, Robert Wood Johnson III, known as Bobby, worked in marketing and was president of the company for four years before resigning because of friction with his father. The two reconciled before the general died, and Bobby Johnson died two years after his father.

But it was Bobby's uncle, J. Seward Johnson Sr., who made headlines when at the age of 76 he married a farmer's daughter -- his 34-year-old Polish chambermaid, Barbara Piasecka -- setting the stage for an ugly feud over his estate after his death in 1983.

At stake: $402,824,971.59, according to David Margolick, who chronicled the battle for the family fortune in the book "Undue Influence: The Epic Battle for the Johnson & Johnson Fortune" (William Morrow & Company, 1993). Although he had set up a trust for his two sons and four daughters, who claimed that their father's young wife had brainwashed him, Mrs. Johnson -- his principal heir-- -- was determined not to give his offspring a penny more than the will stipulated.

The three-year mud-wrestling match -- culminating in a 17-week trial in New York -- ended in an out-of-court settlement in which Mrs. Johnson agreed to pay $160 million to Mr. Johnson's children.

During their marriage, the Johnsons built Jasna Polana, a 46,000-square-foot neo-Classical villa on 140 acres in far western Princeton. After Mr. Johnson's death, Mrs. Johnson moved to Monaco. The mansion -- built at a cost of about $25 million and furnished with antique furniture and artwork from the Johnsons' collection -- is now a private golf club.

But the Johnson family would endure even more.

In 2003, Jamie Johnson -- the son of James Loring Johnson, grandson of J. Seward Johnson Jr. and great-grandson of J. Seward Johnson Sr. -- came out with a provocative film called "Born Rich" that was shown at the Hamptons Film Festival and broadcast on HBO.

Mr. Johnson, who was 23 at the time, said in his tell-all documentary that he had poor male role models: his father was shown as a reclusive artist, and his grandfather as a man who had been consumed by estate battles and bitter divorces.

The daughter of J. Seward Johnson Sr., Mary Lea Richards, and her husband, Marty Richards, produced more-mainstream entertainment, including the shows "Sweeney Todd" and "La Cage Aux Folles" and the films "The Boys from Brazil" and "The Shining," before her death in 1990.

And as many fans of the New York Jets are aware, the National Football League team is owned by Robert Wood Johnson IV -- also known as Woody -- the grandson of General Johnson.