Band-Aids and Basia
How yachting played a role in the fall of the Soviet Union.
The scandal was still fresh and swirling when I met Basia in the late 1970s. Then barely 40 years old, this Polish farmer’s daughter had come to America a few years earlier with $100, a degree in art history and dreams of a better life. Basia— Barbara Piasecka—was now the third wife of one of the richest men in the world. J. Seward Johnson, then in his mid-80s, was heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. Basia had started as his cook and chambermaid, advanced to a position as curator of his art collection and finally replaced Johnson’s second wife a couple years before our meeting.
My involvement started innocently enough, with a visit to the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, a Smithsonian-affiliated research facility founded by Johnson and run by Ed Link, of aviation fame. A few weeks later, I got a call from them inquiring if I could help Johnson with a problem on his yacht. Within days, I was flying to the Bahamas with the Johnsons aboard their Gulfstream jet to inspect Mazurka, a red-sailed character yacht that had been converted from a Polish fishing trawler. During lunch aboard with the Johnsons and their crew, I realized that Basia had a big heart dedicated to helping her former countrymen, then suffering under Soviet rule. Thus, the yacht and her all-Polish crew were a small step in that direction, a step with a connection that would eventually yield unimagined results.
The subject of manatees came up, and the captain admitted he had never encountered them, so Basia sought to explain. “They are the basis of the legend of mermaids,” she said, “because they have a face that reminds you of a woman.” Johnson looked up from his lunch and interjected, “Not unless you’ve been at sea for years!” It’s not acceptable to laugh at your clients, but those of us who were familiar with manatees could not contain ourselves. Johnson, sporting a scruffy white beard that gave him a Hemingway- esque visage, smiled from ear to ear.
He died a few years later, and after several lengthy and bitter legal battles with Johnson’s children, including even more scandal with accusations of horrendous behavior on both their parts, Basia walked away with the bulk of his estate. While she certainly enjoyed the personal perks of the inheritance, with spacious homes in Italy and Monaco, she did not forget her roots. Her philanthropy, particularly in Poland, became legendary.
Of particular importance was her remembrance of the shipyard workers who had built Mazurka and later converted her to a yacht. When Lech Walesa led his fellow shipwrights in the Solidarity strike centered at Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Basia was there in spirit, pledging upwards of $100 million to sustain the movement. Accounts differ about just how much of the pledge was actually fulfilled, but there’s no question her support was crucial to the strike’s success.
The rest, literally, is history. The Solidarity strike was successful in itself, but it quickly became a wider cause that would eventually lead the Soviet Union to exit Poland. East Germany was next, and finally came the complete dissolution of the USSR itself. Walesa became a Nobel laureate and president of Poland, and Basia became a heroine in her homeland. When she died two years ago, her obituary in The New York Times made much of the scandals, but sadly said little about how this complex and remarkable woman, who loved yachts but knew little about manatees, helped change the world.
I thought you should know.