Certain People Read Online Free PDF

alleged means by which the Johnsons got their double apartment was the talk of the town.
    The Johnsons, so the story went, wanted to buy an apartment on the Carlyle’s twenty-fourth floor. But a neighbor in an adjoining apartment objected. And so John Johnson, who is known in the rich black community affectionately as “The Godfather,” made the neighbor an offer he couldn’t refuse—and asked the neighbor to name his price for the apartment. The neighbor named the price, Johnson wrote out a check, and bought the second apartment The Johnsons knocked down walls, threw the two dwellings together, and created what is now considered to be one of the largest—and is certainly one of the most spectacular—apartments in town.
    What actually happened was something a little different. The Johnsons had already owned, for several years previous to their dramatic move, an apartment on the eighteenth floor of the Carlyle. But they had been looking for a larger place—higher up, with a better view. And Eunice Johnson, a stylish, bubbly, throaty-voiced woman, had been toying with the idea of putting two apartments together. When an apartment on the twenty-fourth floor became available, the only problem was to persuade the owner of the second apartment on the floor to sell. Prejudice was not the issue, and the woman who owned the second apartment had no objection to living next door to blacks. But she had just redecorated her apartment, and was reluctant to give it up. John and Eunice Johnson not only made her a handsome offer for her place, but also sweetened it with $15,000 extra for the woman to redecorate the Johnsons’ old apartment on the eighteenth floor. And so the trade was amicably arranged. “She was very nice about it,” Eunice Johnson says. “When she finished her redecorating on the eighteenth floor, she wrote me a note saying that she hadn’t spent the entire fifteen thousand, and enclosed a check for me for six hundred dollars’ change.”
    And so the Johnsons have their double apartment. They turned decorators Arthur Elrod and William Raiser loose on the place, and, some $250,000 later, the apartment was all done in colors of honey, beige, gold, caramel, and earth brown. “We wanted colors that would match our skin tones,” says Eunice Johnson, a fashion-conscious lady who is also a talented interior designer. The walls of the huge double living room are composed of unfinished strips of barn siding, alternating with panels of beige marble. A large coffee table is made of alternating strips of zebrawood and mahogany, with strips of burnishedbrass at the edges. The thick woven-to-size rug is of custard-colored beige, and the floors are of petrified wood. A room that serves as an office-den has walls covered with leather. Opening off the long central foyer are two marbled and gold-fitted powder rooms, one for ladies and one for gentlemen. Both Eunice and John Johnson have private bed-sitting room suites in the apartment, as do their children, John, Jr., and Linda, and their bathrooms are equipped with bidets and sunken Jacuzzi whirlpool baths. Beds operate electrically, and closet and dressing room doors swing out to reveal countless built-in compartments with Lucite trays for gloves, hose, lingerie, purses, an entire closet for shoes, another for dresses, another for furs. Library walls are covered with real leather, and closet walls are upholstered with imitation fur. Most spectacular, perhaps, is the Johnson kitchen, which, again, is a double affair, with two complete cooking-serving areas, four refrigerator-freezers, two stoves, an electronic oven, a charcoal pit for barbecuing, six sinks, a double pantry, three dishwashers. Though the Johnsons employ a cook and butler, Eunice Johnson is not above going into her kitchen to whip up a pound cake for a special guest. She loves to show off her apartment, pointing to a large Picasso that dominates the dining