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applied for admission, Weigl, also a Lost Tree resident, had begun a campaign to blackball him. Embarrassed, Johnson withdrew his application and ultimately moved up the coast to a town named Jupiter, where he bought and combined a pair of oceanside condominiums. A Johnson supporter in the coup, the director Andrew Sage, bought his Lost Tree home. “When Henry is dead and buried thirty years I’m still not going near his grave,” Johnson said years later, “because I just know a hand is going to reach up through the ground and grab me by the throat.”
     

     
    After Weigl’s ouster staid old Standard Brands became Phi Delta Johnson. Out the door went the linoleum and steel decor. Gone, too, was the prohibition on first-class travel. In no time, Johnson leased a corporate jet and acquired a company-owned Jaguar. Overnight the corporate culture was transformed into a facsimile of Johnson’s flip, breezy manner. Now when Standard Brands managers met, the sessions were laced with outrageous profanity and raucous challenges. “All right,” Johnson liked to convene problem-solving meetings, “whose cock is on the anvil on this one?” The fraternity house mien extended to all levels. Standard Brands executives didn’t say, “I beg to differ,” they said, “You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.” Standard Brands executives had no use for reports and slide shows; they were expected to cut to the heart of the matter. To do otherwise invited Johnson’s favorite withering line: “Thatwas a blinding glimpse of the obvious” (sometimes shortened to simply “a BGO”).
    Often, it took only a short colloquy with Johnson to dispatch a bad idea. Once, a Planters executive came in with a proposal for a regional advertising test. “Could you afford to do this sort of thing nationally?” asked Johnson. “No,” the fellow replied. “Then what the fuck are you doing it for?” asked Johnson. End of story. In a company filled with creatively profane people, no one was more profane than Johnson. Even when he gave interviews for publication, they came tumbling out. A woman who transcribed one of them handed the completed Q & A back to the interviewer, saying, “Here’s the fucking transcript.”
    Johnson had no use for long meetings when short ones would do, or when he was due on a golf course. For that matter, he had no use for traditional business hours. “He would call you at five o’clock and say he wanted to meet you at midnight,” recalled John Murray, who headed the Standard Brands sales force. “Or he would get together with you for dinner at seven P.M. and you’d wind up rambling until five A.M. ” Johnson firmly believed that true inspiration and insight happened only after hours. “Babies,” he said, “are only born at night.”
    On a typical evening, Johnson and his Merry Men would knock off around seven-thirty and head out en masse for the night shift. They would stake out a table at Manuche’s and drink until it closed, convening afterward at Johnson’s new company-owned apartment, where they would order out for pizza or Chinese. When most other Fortune 500 executives were long asleep, Johnson’s band would change into rumpled sweatsuits and settle back for a long night of drinking, talking business, and kicking around ideas. By the wee hours, those still conscious would collapse into the twin beds in the two bedrooms or onto the living room couch. In the morning Peter Rogers would fix breakfast, and they would be off to the races again. “It was,” recalled Johnson, “like Boys Town.”
    Johnson’s life began to resemble nothing so much as an endless buddy movie. The nicknames just kept coming: Carbonell, the Salvadoran R&D chief, was “El Supremo”; Ferdie Falk, who headed the liquor business, was “The Fonz”; Mike Masterpool, a public relations officer brought in from General Electric, was “M3”; and Ward Miller, the finicky corporate secretary, was “Vice President