Madison news - feature: poor little rich girls

They have the world at their Louboutins; so why, asks Gigi Mahon, do the girls who seem to have everything end up with nothing at all?

She was pretty and blonde and rich. She had it all, including the envy of lesser beings who could scarcely imagine a life like hers. Was there a party she didn’t attend? Were there designer clothes she didn’t possess? Behold her beautiful home, maybe even a palace, and her worthy art. She had a famous name, a birthright. She smiled for the camera. The camera smiled back at her.

But what she didn’t have was most of what really matters. She had lost her way, if she had ever really had a way to begin with, and one day it turned out that she, like everyone else, was mortal. Death was the great equaliser. She died in a car crash while attempting to elude the media. Or in a lonely bed, felled by a cocktail of drugs and liquor. Her passing was international news. Some headlines read, simply: “Poor little rich girl dies alone.”

“Pity the poor little rich girl.” It’s an oft-sung refrain. But why do we sing it? And who is this girl, anyway? Why do we care, as her trials and travails, her hard partying and dangerous behaviour, spill out in endless newsprint and countless blogs to be feasted on by a gossip-hungry public? Is it just that we can’t resist a train wreck? Is it schadenfreude? Why does she inspire works of art, great and not so great? Legions of authors, playwrights and filmmakers have paused to consider her. She is Shakespeare’s tragic Ophelia and Desdemona, Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess.

She was Diana, Princess of Wales, who won the hand, but not the heart, of her prince; and she was heiress Barbara Hutton,  who suffered depression, anorexia and multiple suicide attempts. She was Edie Sedgwick, the wild-child socialite who partied with Andy Warhol and whose life was cut short at 28 by “probable acute barbiturate intoxication”, according to her death certificate. She was tragic, four-times-married Christina Onassis. Today, she is Lisa Marie Presley, struggling to assert her identity in the shadow of her father; and Versace heiress Allegra Versace, who has long battled anorexia. She is rock royalty Kelly Osbourne, who regularly makes headlines for drug addiction, depression and violent outbursts; and she is Peaches Geldof, who has flirted with the same reckless lifestyle that claimed her mother.
This year, she became the cautionary tale known as Casey Johnson, an heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, the bisexual socialite daughter of New York’s Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV – the owner of the New York Jets – and his ex-wife, Sale. She grew up in a five-bedroom Fifth Avenue apartment. But in January, at age 30, she passed away in a rented house in West Hollywood.

The official cause of death was diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by lack of insulin and high blood sugar. She died alone in bed, like her idol Marilyn Monroe. Even though her demise was attributed to natural causes (the coroner said Johnson hadn’t been taking her insulin and “wasn’t taking good care of herself”), to many who knew her, it was a death foretold, a matter of when, not if. She seemed to be spiralling downwards into ever more risky behaviour. Whereas her immediate family had generally protected their privacy, Johnson, once she entered her 20s, seemed to thrive in the seductive heat of the limelight.

It didn’t start out like that, of course. The adult who became an object lesson was once a little girl, the eldest of three daughters, who was described by friends as sweet and generous. She was diagnosed at age eight with type 1 diabetes.
In recent years, even with – or maybe because of – her heavy make-up, spiky eyelashes, teetering heels, tight clothing and über-plumped red lips, Johnson always seemed vulnerable. Behind the painted facade, one could glimpse a child in pigtails, but one who’d grown notorious. She engaged in public feuds. She took to the press to accuse her aunt Elizabeth Ross Johnson of filching a boyfriend. Improbably, given her lifestyle, she managed to adopt a baby girl from Kazakhstan. She named her Ava-Monroe, after Marilyn. Her mother would soon take custody.

When Johnson moved to LA, she began mixing with a gang of girls behaving badly that included Lindsay Lohan, Bijou Phillips and a pair of sisters whom she had known since childhood – Paris and Nicky Hilton. Among their escapades was a fistfight at a club. Another time a girlfriend allegedly set Johnson’s hair on fire. On a separate occasion, Johnson was arrested for burglary. Not long before she died, she announced her engagement to bisexual reality TV star, Tila Tequila.
Always, there were parties and clubs, drugs and drink, the latter habits being that much more dangerous for a person with diabetes. Johnson flunked rehab a number of times. Her family reportedly cut off her funds, a last-resort move that is endorsed by many chemical-dependency experts.

Anita Ronis, a therapist and former executive director of the Freedom Institute, a Manhattan-based organisation that counsels individuals and families affected by chemical dependency, has seen many wayward children of the wealthy come through her doors. “It’s a story that needs to be told,” she says. “There’s no sympathy for people who are incredibly attractive or terrifically wealthy or the envy of the average person.”

What she has observed are young people who are full of shame and self-loathing. “There is unbelievable pressure,” she explains. “They don’t quite measure up in the end. They can’t integrate as a whole person. There is emotional devastation.” She says that people who would dismiss these girls “don’t take the time to look into their souls and look into the emptiness of their eyes”.

Of course, the male heirs of wealthy, successful bloodlines are no strangers to scandal, either.
One needs only to look at America’s most prominent political family – the Kennedys – to see that. In 1991, JFK’s nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was tried and acquitted for rape, while his uncle Ted Kennedy will forever be remembered for the infamous 1969 “Chappaquiddick incident” in which a car, driven by Kennedy on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, careered off the road and into a tidal channel, killing the passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy fled the scene of the crime and did not call for help – which, some believe could have saved Kopechne’s life. It was a move that would shadow Kennedy’s career for the rest of his life.

Other family dynasties have been similarly afflicted. The Getty oil family have been plagued by disaster and a long history of drug abuse. Great-grandson of Jean Paul Getty, actor Balthazar Getty, had a famously tortured relationship with heroin and alcohol as have other oil tycoon progeny, including banking and oil heir Matthew Mellon (the former husband of Jimmy Choo president Tamara Mellon), who has been in and out of rehab suffering from cocaine addiction.

The one-time boyfriend of Paris Hilton, oil and real-estate heir Brandon Davis, has repeatedly struggled with gambling, drugs and alcohol, and in April this year, former drug addict Cameron Douglas (son of Michael and his first wife Diandra) was sentenced to five years’ jail for dealing crystal meth.

Jamie Johnson, a fellow Johnson & Johnson heir and Casey Johnson’s cousin, believes unachievable expectations are to blame. “For rich kids, it’s harder to build your own identity as the identity of your family is looming in such an overwhelming way,” he says. While he is the first to admit his own trust-fund status, Jamie is also the auteur of the unexpectedly affecting 2003 documentary Born Rich. The film opens on the eve of his 21st birthday, upon which he will “inherit more money than most people can earn or spend in a lifetime” and features many of his similarly very  privileged friends.

One subject is Josiah Hornblower, a member of both the Whitney and Vanderbilt clans who grew up believeing his family was poor and was shocked to learn, when he turned 18, that he was a millionaire. “It’s kind of hard to accept when you are a kid and you haven’t done anything yet,” he says in the film, “while you have other friends who just have their little checking accounts with money they earned from summer jobs.”

Catherine Steiner-Adair is a Massachusetts-based psychologist and author of the book Full of Ourselves: A Wellness Program to Advance Girl Power, Health, and Leadership. She sees girls as young as second graders becoming “a little wobbly with the security of their connections to themselves and their parents if the parents are preoccupied by a very active social life”. The girls, she says, “have difficulty figuring out what is more important: the dinner party their mother is getting dressed for or the story of their day at school”. If a mother allocates disproportionate importance to expensive clothes and bags and jewellery, it is asking a lot to expect her daughter to come up with a different set of values.

Steiner-Adair uses the term “affluenza” to describe the habits of families that are too focused on material goods and “a glitzy social life”. And, yes, she says, many of these kids’ problems are peculiar to the very rich. “When kids grow up flying in their own airplanes and bringing other kids, it gives them a power and an influence that some 16 or 18 or even 24-year-olds can’t handle.”
“It is so poignant,” continues Steiner-Adair, “when girls in my groups complain about the strictness of their parents – ‘They won’t let me do this; they won’t let me do that’ – and a girl who so far has been silent speaks up and says, ‘You don’t even know how lucky you are that your parents even care.’ ”

A former teacher at one of the top private girls’ schools in New York feels passionately that the problem lies with “a basic lack of middle-class values”. As she tells it: “There is much too much money and no supervision. Nobody is paying their kids the kind of attention that they need to have paid. They are neglected. Their lives are filled with classes and after-school activities and tutors that they don’t really need. The parents go out every night. The kids are left alone on weekends while the parents go to Palm Beach.”

So the kids fill the emptiness with drugs, alcohol, parties and pricey possessions. Casey Johnson told Page Six Magazine in a 2008 interview: “I got my first Chanel bag at 12. I got a $17,000 gold Cartier watch when I was 15… There’s nothing left to want.”
In Born Rich, media heir Si Newhouse IV notices that “you see a lot of shows on TV that try to make it seem like the everyday middle-class family is where the real life is, where happiness exists.”

Indeed, despite popular disparagement of middle-class values as bourgeois, they do seem to stand the test of time, even if they don’t guarantee happiness. Successful families recognise the importance of education and hard work, striving for purpose and, while often questing for material goods, believe they have to work hard to obtain them. When wealthy kids get their own jobs, they learn how many hundreds or even thousands of hours most people would have to put in to pay for that two-week trip to Jamaica they themselves took for granted.
The families that make it “don’t throw a lot of money at their children”, Steiner-Adair observes. “The kids don’t get the best tennis racquet when they are five; they rent skis before they buy them. They make their own beds, even if there are others who could do it. They simply empty the dishwasher; it is not done for them.”

Among the kids he filmed, Jamie Johnson found that “the ones who seemed to be doing well and come across as well-adjusted seemed to be making the transition from identifying with family to finding self-identity and self-awareness”. But for that to occur? “Ninety per cent of it is parenting.” Meaningful involvement in their children’s lives is something even the richest families can’t buy. Sometimes the price they pay is the loss of the poor little rich girl they used to know: their own daughter.