THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 10, 1996 TAG: 9606100043
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARC DAVIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 200 lines
``If you receive this letter, then I have come to some untimely end. Please know that whatever it was I was prepared as best I could be. . . I have had a wonderful life largely because of you and because up until now at least I have been very lucky.''
- Beverly Johnson in a letter to her parents, 1994
Beverly Johnson pushed her luck like a bulldozer on high octane, hard as she could, far as it would go.
Johnson cheated death around the globe, in remote and dangerous places. She flew a flimsy gyrocopter in windy Antarctica. She climbed solo up the sheer face of El Capitan in Yosemite. She parachuted into uncharted jungles in New Guinea.
All these things Beverly Johnson survived and lived to tell about. She swapped stories with Johnny Carson on ``The Tonight Show'' and answered questions from Soupy Sales on ``To Tell The Truth.''
Hers was a charmed life. Sports Illustrated called her the top woman rock climber of her day. She lived happily in a cabin in Wyoming with her husband, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker named Mike Hoover. Together, they sought ever-new adventures to capture on film.
Then the luck ran out.
On Easter Sunday 1994, Johnson was killed at age 47 in a freak helicopter crash in the mountains of Nevada. She had been skiing with friends. The helicopter that had ferried them up a remote mountain that morning was carrying them back in a snowstorm when the engine failed.
Four people died in the wreck, but Johnson was hardly the most famous. Newspapers the next day declared: ``Frank Wells, Disney President, Killed In Copter Crash.''
It was only by sheer luck that actor Clint Eastwood was not among the dead. He had left the small ski party in an earlier chopper.
Now, two years later, Johnson's parents sit in their Virginia Beach condominium and contemplate Beverly's frenzied life.
Signs of Beverly are everywhere. A glamour photo sits prominently on a living room table. Newspaper clippings and pictures fill a big box in the den closet. A videotape is running on the television for a visitor, showing a young, dirt-faced Beverly struggling up a cliff in Venezuela.
``There's my poor, darling daughter,'' Edward Johnson says, ``who we raised to be a debutante.''
The Johnsons - who live half-time in Florida, half-time in Virginia Beach's Cove Point Condominiums off Laskin Road - are parties to a legal fight over their daughter's death. In April, they sued the helicopter's manufacturer and operator. Theirs is one of five lawsuits pending in federal court in Reno over the crash.
The Johnsons probably won't get much money from the lawsuit, even if they win. Frank Wells' family stands to get the bulk, since Wells earned $50 million the year he died, and therefore has suffered the biggest income loss.
That's OK, Ed Johnson says. The lawsuit isn't about money.
``There are some errors that need to be addressed,'' Johnson says. ``Some people did sloppy work and some of it hasn't been corrected.''
Thomas Harlan, a Norfolk lawyer who represents the family, has compiled a fat dossier on Beverly Johnson and the Nevada crash. It includes a 115-page report from federal investigators that found the helicopter crashed after sucking snow into its engine. A judge will decide if that was the pilot's fault, the manufacturer's fault or simply fate.
The case is exceptional for the money at stake - an insurance company for the helicopter operator is offering $10 million, to be split among the plaintiffs - and the personalities involved, including Beverly Johnson.
``I guess everybody loves their kids,'' Harlan says, ``but this is an exceptional kid, a one in a million.''
I have had about as much fun and adventure as it is possible to have. I have loved and been loved. I am sorry that I haven't done much for the improvement of the planet but that was the next phase. Rather poor planning on my part. I have lived enough for 100 years, it just got a bit compressed.''
- Beverly's letter to her parents
This is not how Ed and Doreen Johnson imagined their little girl's life.
From the start, Beverly enjoyed the usual perks of growing up feminine in the 1950s. Her photo album is a blur of frilly pink and white dresses in the early years - a prom dress for Sweet Sixteen, a flowing white thing for a debutante ball, a tasteful outfit for college.
``I just wanted her to be a nice little lady and grow up and get married,'' Doreen Johnson says.
Then, abruptly, the frilly things disappear. After college, the photo album is 36 pages of Beverly outdoors in jeans and shorts, T-shirts and sweats. Almost none are indoors.
Here's Beverly in a turtleneck at Yosemite. There's Beverly in polo shirt sailing the Chesapeake. Here's Beverly in Muslim garb in Afghanistan. There's Beverly and Mike in ski suits atop a Nevada mountain, just before her death.
Beverly wanted no part of the feminine mystique.
``She didn't like dolls. She was always athletically inclined,'' her mother recalls.
First it was ballet in junior high. Her mother discouraged it, fearing the sport would bulk up Beverly's legs. No matter; Beverly sucked it up. Next came gymnastics. In college there was swimming and sailing and, finally, mountain climbing with the boys.
Not team sports, but solo pursuits. ``That was her challenge,'' Doreen Johnson says. ``It came from the inside.''
By 1978, Johnson was living at Yosemite National Park, helping with the firefighting and rescue team. That was the year she climbed the 3,000-foot vertical wall of El Capitan solo, the first woman ever to do it. It took 10 days and won her national headlines.
Johnson became a reluctant celebrity. The ``Tonight Show'' called, and Doc Severinsen's band played ``Climb Every Mountain'' as she crossed the stage to meet Johnny Carson.
That was just the start. Soon, Johnson was the subject of TV documentaries and films, mostly by her husband Mike Hoover, as they hopped around the planet. The camera captured her everywhere - falling down a deep crevasse in Antarctica, playing the harmonica with aborigine tribesmen in New Guinea, leaping from crack to crack on a rock mountain in Venezuela.
Always Johnson was shown as the gutsy girl who kept up with the boys, then passed them. Her exploits filled the TV screen in shows like ``The American Sportsmen'' and ``Spirit of Adventure'' and ``Wide World of Sports.''
``Why do you do it?'' Johnny Carson asked.
``I have no idea,'' Johnson replied shyly.
But she did. In a film of her New Guinea adventure, Johnson described the thrill of victory.
``It's curious how enjoyable summits are,'' Johnson said. ``It's not conquest. There aren't prizes. You don't expect a brass band and, sure enough, when you get there, there isn't one. . . But you're so glad to be alive.
The temptation to do things that are unsafe is great because they are so much fun.''
- Beverly on flying a gyrocopter in Antarctica
Ed Johnson can't figure it out: Why would anyone want to fly a gyrocopter in Antarctica?
The vehicle isn't sturdy. It's a tiny, open-air, one-seat helicopter-like machine. The weather is lousy. Winds in Antarctica are unpredictable and strong. And if the copter fails, the pilot can just look between her knees and see where she will land. There is no rescue crew.
So why, Johnson wonders, would his own daughter want to fly this contraption around the South Pole?
``I didn't want her to do this,'' says Johnson, a retired Navy fighter pilot, watching Beverly on videotape. ``The margin of error is too thin and the weather is too changeable. There's not much safety margin in the thing.''
Yet there she is: Beverly aloft, zipping around icy cliffs and crags, smiling and looking for all the world like she's having a hell of a time on this wild machine.
``What did they really accomplish?'' Ed Johnson asks, eyes still riveted on the videotape. ``Nothing. Zero. It's just something different to do.''
Beverly Johnson had a strange idea of fun. Often it involved danger. Usually it involved making a documentary with her husband Mike.
``Their idea of a great vacation,'' Ed Johnson says, ``would be to write a script and sell it to someone who'd pay them to go to Antarctica, so they could freeze their tootsies.''
And yet, for all of Beverly's daredevil antics, the Johnsons never really feared for Beverly's life. For one thing, Beverly seldom told her parents what she was doing until it was over. She didn't want to scare them.
For another, the Johnsons had confidence in their daughter's abilities. Beverly knew the limits of her body and her equipment, her father says.
``I always figured if anything ever happened to Beverly, it would be something she didn't have control over,'' Ed Johnson says.
He was right. When Beverly Johnson died, she was sitting in the back of a small Bell helicopter, unaware until the very end that the chopper was even going down.
While most skiing isn't very dangerous, the kind that Beverly Johnson and Mike Hoover enjoyed was. It's called heliskiing, and it is very expensive. It entails finding remote mountains that can be reached only by helicopter, then swooshing through virgin snow. No trails, no crowds.
It's the kind of skiing that almost killed model Christie Brinkley and four others when their helicopter went down in Colorado in 1994.
``It is a rush being around the helicopter lifting you up to run after run of untracked beautiful powder snow,'' Ross McGae, marketing director at Mountain Helisports near Whistler, British Columbia, told the San Francisco Examiner in 1994.
But it is also a potentially dangerous sport. Sometimes new snow hides bumps and drops on the mountainside. Sometimes just getting there is the most dangerous part.
That's what happened to Beverly Johnson and her party. Their helicopter got caught in a snowstorm, was forced down for two hours of waiting, then tried to take off again. The pilot may not have known there was snow in the engine. The copter fell to the ground, killing everyone except Mike Hoover, who suffered a fractured skull, neck, shoulder, elbow, rib cage and leg.
The irony is not lost on Ed and Doreen Johnson: Their daughter, a woman who risked life and limb on countless more-dangerous adventures, met death at a simple ski party.
The Johnsons take solace in Beverly's own words, told to friends, family and interviewers countless times.
``She always said, `Mother, if anything ever happens to me, you must remember I'm doing what I want to do,' '' Doreen Johnson recalled. `` `I'm enjoying my life.' ''
I have appreciated every day and marvelled at what a wonderful and mysterious thing life is. I do not look to any further life, but this one was life enough.''
- Beverly's letter to her parents MEMO: [For a related story, see page B2 of The Virginian-Pilot for this
date.] ILLUSTRATION: A CHARMED LIFE, AN UNTIMELY DEATH
LEFT: In 1978, Beverly Johnson became the first woman to climb
Yosemite National Park's El Capitan solo.
RIGHT: Frank Wells, president of Walt Disney Co., top, also died in
the crash that killed Johnson. Mike Hoover, right, Johnson's
husband, was the sole survivor.
KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT HELICOPTER LAWSUIT by CNB