Gayfryd was born in Vancouver. B.C., in 1950 to Ross McNabb, a telephone company clerk, and his wife, Margaret, At 20, she dropped out of the University of British Columbia to marry a metallurgy engineer, with whom she moved to South Africa. That union ended in 1976, after the couple had relocated to New Orleans. Never one to spend her nights playing solitaire, Gayfryd married Johnson one month after her divorce. Despite his fortune, Johnson did not prove to be the best provider: By 1982, he was charged with evading taxes on $7 million of personal income. He pleaded guilty, and after his conviction, Gayfryd divorced him. (Johnson was sentenced in 1983 to a 14-month prison term. He committed suicide in 1985, soon after his release.) U.S. News& World Report deemed Gayfryd "the queen of nouvelle society." Even the often-brutal Vanity Fair, in a fawning story by editor Tina Brown, called Gayfryd "the most likely to succeed" of the new-money socialites. Instead of dipping into her husband's half-billion dollar fortune only for dresses and decorating, Mrs. Steinberg had become an organizer and fund-raiser for the writers' organization PEN. a board member of New York University's Institute of Fine Art and. with her husband, adoptive parents of a class of students in the South Bronx.