As her ex-husband, Robert L. Johnson, launches a hedge fund
that people are calling his second act after Black Entertainment Television
(BET), Sheila Crump Johnson is juggling more than half a dozen second acts of
her own. The Johnsons are still best known as the founders of BET, which netted
them $3 billion when they sold it to Viacom in 2000, but also drove them to
divorce. Since her liquidity event, Sheila Johnson has become either an angel or
an overly ambitious developer, depending on the point of view. The New York Times called her a
"philanthropist from heaven" for her $7 million gift to Parsons School of
Design. A certain faction in the horse country of Loudon County, Va., however,
wants to halt her plans to build a luxury resort and spa on 340 acres once owned
by Pamela Harriman. (The proposal finally passed the town council last summer by
a 4-to-3 vote after three years of debate.) She spoke with Worth features editor Jan Alexander about
getting even and trying everything.  If not for a conspiracy of circumstances you might still be a
music teacher.
I wanted to be a violinist in
college. Then reality set in when I realized that there was no way I was going
to make a living performing in an orchestra. I played one season in Chicago. I
was sweating bullets. That was a tough gig. I think it was really something I
wasn’t cut out for, and I was better at teaching. You were married to Bob Johnson all this time,
right? Yeah. I taught at Sidwell
Friends School in Washington and I needed a second job. I heard Denise Nichols
was leaving a production of Ceremonies
in Dark Old Men at the Negro Ensemble Theatre,
which had come down from New York. I went down there and auditioned with a bunch
of other people, and I got the job. I made a lot more money doing that than
teaching school. Bill Newman, who is my husband now, was in that production. He
was really young. He’s a year younger than I am, but at that time he was really
young. Of all the people in the company, he was the one I could relate to the
best. The others were very New York. I didn’t see him again until much later.
Those who read the wedding pages of the New York Times know
Bill was the judge who heard your case when you and Bob divorced.
Bill had a role in Another World and
worked at the Arena Stage in Washington, but I think ultimately his father must
have hit him on the head and said, "Listen, you’re not going to make it." So he
decided to go to law school. Thirty years later, in 2002, I walked into the courtroom in
Arlington, Va., to finalize my divorce and there he was. We were married at my
farmhouse in Virginia [in September 2005]. In the intervening years, Bill must have read about you even if he
was not among the demographics that ultimately became the audience for BET and
the videos that you have said resembled soft-core porn. Bob first started talking about
starting an all-black network because he was upset with the way the media was
portraying African-Americans. There was so much good going on out there, but no
one ever heard about it. He was on a mission. We had some stunning programs when
we started. We had Bill Cosby and Maya Angelou reading stories on the air. This
was the 1980s, and music videos came out around that time. At first I couldn’t wait to watch the videos. Everything was
clean and wonderful. The videos also needed a market, and at the time MTV would
not show any African-American videos. Finally they realized they were missing
revenue. It didn’t cost us anything to put them on so it was pure profit. We
clicked on all cylinders. It was later on, as we were all moved out of the
company, that I think BET took a decline.
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